Too Skinny To Be Luna
she says gently, "since early childhood. Possibly since birth."
I sit with that for a long moment, the weight of it settling slowly, thoroughly, into places I didn't know still had room for fresh grief. Years of mockery — too skinny to survive a heat, too skinny to bear children, too skinny to matter — every cruel whisper I absorbed and internalized as simple fact about my own inadequate body, never once questioning whether the inadequacy itself might have been imposed rather than natural.
"You're telling me," I say slowly, "that I was never actually meant to be this thin. That my whole life, everyone who mocked me for it — they were mocking something that was done to me. Not something wrong