We were in the back of a van hurtling through the dark, strange streets of India. This was in 2000, late at night, but the sky was green with fluorescent lights spilled from the sprawling city.  Barbed wires glinted in the shadows.  Rumpled men huddled over benches with starved-looking dogs collapsed at their feet.  

     Holly and I pressed closer.  I could feel the bones in her knees, the muscles in her thighs.  Even after hours of air travel, she smelled liked strawberries and spearmint.  She was the only person I knew here, 7,000 miles away from home, and though I’d only met her 40 minutes earlier at the airport baggage claim, I imagined trading her in for someone different, someone without pearl earrings and a J. Crew windbreaker, someone who was awkward and uncertain, more like me.  

     In a flurry, Holly told me about her boyfriend who’d played football at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.  They’d met during rush week, planned to get married, have at least five kids.

     “I talk too much when I’m nervous,” she said.

     Our van jolted to a halt, and the driver leapt out and lit into a cow parked in the street.  We watched through the windshield.  The cow snorted and shuddered, then lumbered away.  The driver climbed back into the van.  The van lunged forward.  Soon, we entered a heavily populated area with diesel fume pockets and motorcycle roars.  Men charred meat on skewers, balanced five to a bicycle, held hands in the street.  I tried to spot a single woman but I couldn’t see one.

     “What’s the farthest you’ve ever been from home?” Holly asked.

     I said, “Italy with my high school Latin class.”

     She said, “Orlando.”     We laughed, and she reached for my hand.  Her fingers were perfectly manicured.  My nails were bitten.  

     “We’ll take care of each other,” she said.  

     I nodded.

     “We will,” she insisted.  “It’s true.”

     I’d come to India a year out of college to interview village women about their health and bodies.  Holly was going to teach English to village kids.  A US-based organization called Building Cross-Cultural Bridges had arranged our “volunteer vacations.”  Over the phone and through emails, the details had made perfect sense.  Spend two nights in New Delhi before travelling into the Himalayan foothills for pre-planned service projects in Himalchal Pradesh.  I was hypnotized by the idea of helping, by the notion of service.  I’d wanted to study abroad in college but had gotten sick.  India was a land of a million deities.  A Hindu god with the head of an elephant could be worshipped next to a Buddhist temple down the road from a Muslim mosque.  I wanted to discover something so meaningful I could devote my entire life to it.

     There were 10 other volunteers, mostly white American women with oversized ideas about improving our planet.  Three volunteers were applying for the Peace Corps.  A single male, named Sanjay, knew snippets of Hindi, but the rest of us spoke only the most commonplace words like “namaste” and “chai.”    

     That first night, after Holly and I had brushed our teeth with bottled water and unrolled our sleeping bags onto thin foam bed rolls arranged on the floor beside swarms of ants, the sky split to gushing rain, and the first of many monsoon storms swept through the city, washing trash and dead rodents into the streets.  In the morning, sewage swamped the roads.  Rickshaws tossed up stinky sprays.  Holly and I skirted the edges of murky puddles and walked with the other volunteers to a second flat for breakfast.  Cutting through a lot, we passed the ruins of a temple.  Holly grabbed my arm and pulled me towards it.  She wanted “our picture.”  She tossed my camera to another volunteer.  Wrapping an arm around me, she cinched me close.  I still have the picture glued into an album I made when I got home.  Holly’s smile is radiant, toothy.  My face is flushed with heat.  We look like old pals, even though I remember at the time marveling at how quickly she’d decided I was an acceptable candidate for a friendship.  

     I was still strong-arming myself back together after a couple of rough years.  Sometimes too many things happen at once.  My heart had been broken.  A close friend had been raped.  I was still furious at my father for trespassing onto the floor of a basketball game and yelling, “You fucking asshole,” at my female coach.  I hurt all the time and wanted to be unbreakable, someone who was not demolished daily by emotions, someone who was beyond longing, needing, and pain.

     I was a sophomore in college.  In late September in New England, half the girls on campus wore short skirts without tights.  Knees and calves flashed everywhere.  I compared them to my own.  My knees were disturbingly asymmetrical, bony yet plump, slightly athletic yet also bow-legged.  Other knees were leaner, more proportionate.  Other calves more contoured, more firm.  I hated my legs and stomach, which looked flat, but only in relationship to the rest of my body, which was plumper than it ought to be due to the Freshman Fifteen.  

     I started to run like a motherfucker and eat like a bird.  I gave up alcohol because it made me crave junk food.  I hit the StairMaster five minutes after dinner and 60 minutes before lunch.  When I was hungry, I drank Diet Coke.  I chewed gum.  I built bigger salads with more lettuce and cucumbers.  Months of this and the boy I was dating said he’d seen me from across the quad and mistaken me for a corpse.  Dead eyes, blue lips, present but not really.  I stopped speaking to him.  I didn’t want anyone to understand the violence of what I was doing to myself.  I didn’t know how to stop it, though I wanted to.  I took a medical leave from college.  My therapist referred me to an eating disorder program at a Massachusetts hospital the day before I was supposed to start a new job blending smoothies at a health cafe inside a gym.  I still wonder what might have happened if I hadn’t gotten help.  

     In the hospital, you started at the bottom and worked your way up.  You had to eat everything off your tray before you were able to earn certain levels of privilege.  Fresh air was a privilege.  Walking was a privilege.  The use of scissors at craft time and the option of taking the elevator up to the sixth-floor nursery to peek at the rosy newborns with a chaperone were privileges.  In the beginning, before I earned any privileges, I had to ring a buzzer every time I used a toilet.  A nurse came into the bathroom and looked over my pee or shit and, if I hadn’t puked, which I never did, the nurse gave me permission to flush.  Then she left the bathroom, and I washed my hands.  I stared at my face in the mirror.  My features appeared carved in wood, deeply etched furrows and worry lines everywhere.  It was a lie that thinness begot beauty.  It begot a kind of premature aging, a premature death.  When I saw the nurses in the hallway or at group, I looked away.  I wanted to be like them, compassionate, no-nonsense, vibrant, healthy.  But I imagined when they saw me, they saw piss and shit in place of my face.  

     At the second flat in Delhi, mangoes, bananas, cereal, yogurt, and milk were spread across a table.  We debated which fruits gave you ringworm, tapeworm, which vegetables you could trust.  Everyone knew someone who had come to India, ingested something contaminated, shit non-stop for days, and returned to the US 30 pounds lighter.  I was afraid of getting sick again.  I had barely reached the weight my nutritionist had earmarked as my short-term goal.  Holly went for the mangoes, dry cereal, brown toast, hard-boiled eggs.  She wasn’t afraid to fill up a plate.  I chose a banana and several spoonfuls of yogurt.  

     Hari Singh, our trip leader, arrived after breakfast wearing dark sunglasses and a full-faced beard.  He introduced himself as a husband, a father, a practicing Sikh.  Being a Sikh meant many things but what I remember most is that it meant he could never cut his hair or beard and that he had to wear a turban and carry a small wooden comb in his pocket wherever he went.  He was also supposed to wear a sword on his body.  I looked for sharp edges jutting out from beneath his clothes.  

     He told us the rules, most of which applied only to women.  Women shouldn’t drink alcohol in public.  When we traveled into the mountains, we should cover our necks and throats.  Though the temperature in the city was soaring, well above 90, short sleeve shirts were unacceptable.  Bare arms gave off the impression of promiscuity.  

     He asked for our names but little else about why we had chosen to come here, what we hoped to learn, what we hoped we might give.  When we were done, he said, “I have bad news.”

     The monsoon storms had triggered massive avalanches and mudslides in the mountains.  The roads were impassable.  We needed to postpone our trip into the foothills and remain in Delhi for several more days while the erosion was cleared.

     Even I, one of the newest arrivals, understood that holding tight in Delhi meant more broiling heat, broken ceiling fans, ants invading our pillows, air pollution that formed a gritty second skin in the hollows of our throats.  An endless sea of sweat-sheened bodies jostling for the smallest slivers of personal space.  

     “What will we do if we can’t get rid of the mice?” one woman asked.  

     “Will we get our money back,” another said, “if the mudslides aren’t cleared in time?”

     Hari waved off our questions and disappeared into the kitchen.  Soon, he emerged with a tray of food.  A huge folded pancake stuffed with peas and potatoes; some kind of pretzel-shaped fried dough soaked in sweet sugar paste.  We passed the tray around, grazed at the offerings.  Someone asked if we could get cots to raise our bed rolls off the floor, where our mouths while we slept inhaled dust, the husks of dead insects, and probably rat feces.  I nibbled the least greasy corner of a samosa.

     “Quiet,” Hari said to us.  “Eat.”

     In the hospital, we were forced to participate in something called Assertiveness Training.  Dr. B., who was at least three times wider and a good foot taller than any one of us, towered over the front of a small conference room and held up cue cards presenting statements we were supposed to identify as Aggressive, Passive Aggressive, or Assertive.

     When I get angry, I don’t talk.

     I take my frustrations out on other people.

     I am able to tell others what is on my mind.

     Dr. B. had already told us many things about ourselves.  He’d told us we were depressed and anorexic.  Or bulimic and OCD.  He’d told us we needed Prozac or Zoloft or Xanax or Paxil.  At the start of Assertiveness Training, he told us we needed to learn how to express our feelings in functional ways, that too often we “internalized our anger” and acted “passively aggressively” to avoid confrontation.  

     “What an asshole,” I whispered to Jenny, who sat beside me, both arms pulled inside her huge grey fleece.  

     “He swallows his patients to feed his ego,” she said.

     Jenny was my favorite because we laughed together in the face of constant humiliation.  We laughed when the nurses forbid us from watching Oprah on the rec room TV.  We laughed when the nutritionist made us bake banana bread and all of us girls hid and squirmed to avoid cracking the eggs, adding the oil and butter, as if these ingredients and their associated fat grams and calories could be absorbed into our digestive systems through our skin.  We laughed at Dr. B, the irony of him, of all people, being an “expert” on us.  He got paid heaps of money to understand us but he didn’t know our names.  

     Our first exercise in asserting ourselves involved group-sharing an emotion we were feeling and a change we wanted to see.  I wanted to say I felt like trash when I had to buzz a nurse and ask her to check my urine.  I wanted someone to trust me when I said I wasn’t a puker, that I hadn’t thrown-up since I was 12.

     I said, “Pass.”

     Jenny said, “I feel bloated.  I want to be taken off my afternoon Ensure.”

     “We’ll talk later,” Dr. B said.  “Next.”

     I watched him as the other girls spoke.  I wanted to be wrong about him.  I wanted some sign he saw us as human, complicated, differentiated, self-aware, that he did not glom us all together into one broad group on account of us all being sick.  His eyes flicked to his watch, his attention leaping to the next patients he would see.  His hands aligned his cue cards, slipped them back into his briefcase.  When he was in a room with us, we became even less of ourselves.  I lost my words because I didn’t want to waste them on deaf ears.  I became who he thought I was, a mental patient, a diagnosis, another woman who was stuck in a hospital, not because she was gritty, persistent, fighting like a goddamn gladiator to get better, but because she sucked at being alive.  

     Holly and I explored New Delhi by rickshaw.  When we reached a temple, we hopped off and explored by foot.  Children mobbed us, selling trinkets, begging for rupees.  At the market, men reached out and stroked my hair.  I cringed and froze.  Holly wore her mother’s wedding ring so she wouldn’t look wild and slutty.  I went to a tailor to get measured for a salwar kameez.  I needed more fabric to become invisible.  

     Back at our flat, we collapsed on our sleeping bags and talked about what we missed.  Food that didn’t wreak havoc on our stomachs.  Men who didn’t equate bare arms with a free pass at an unwanted touch.  Western, sit-on toilets.  Reliable electricity powering reliable fans.  I had tried to email my mother at an Internet café but seconds before hitting send, the power grid failed, and my words were swallowed.  When I started crying, a white woman sitting near me pulled a roll of toilet paper from her backpack and handed me a square to blot my eyes.  Then I’d ducked into a public restroom with a squatter toilet and accidentally peed on my foot.

     When I told this to Holly, she said, “I do that every day.  Every day, I piss my sandals and secretly cry about it. I still haven’t taken a shit.”

     I said, “I’ve already taken 57, and that’s a problem.”

     She lifted her shirt and showed me her bloated belly, which looked unhappy and sore.  She offered me an Imodium.  I wished her a big and timely dump.

     “Can you clog a toilet if it doesn’t flush?” she asked.

     “Is that like a Zen koan?”

     She said, “It should be.  I’m going to meditate on that now.”

     We rolled over onto our sides so we were facing one another.  Our angry stomachs conversed.

     “Remember during the van ride here when we said we’d take care of each other?” Holly asked.

     I said, “Yes.”

     She said, “We’re doing it.”

     What I knew about Jenny’s life before the eating disorder program was this:  She lived in New Hampshire, was a junior in high school.  She turned quiet and inward when anyone mentioned home.  Before coming to the program, Jenny had gone to a bad hospital where staff force-fed her milkshakes.  She’d gained her weight back too quickly, and her brain had shut down.  She made this sound funny, like a tabloid headline: Milkshake Causes Nervous Breakdown.  But I got the sense she’d hurt herself, cut herself, that when doctors and nurses entered her room, she’d stared through them without blinking.  I remember a story about the worst day of her life.  Something had happened at school, and she was upset, and when she went home to her mother for comfort, her mother slapped her.  When she fell to her knees, her mother pulled her up by the ends of her hair.  

     My heart had been broken by a boy I didn’t know I cared for until he got a girlfriend.  Before I met Jenny and the other girls and women in the unit, I thought I was the first person in the universe to love someone more than they loved me back.  I thought no one else had ever spent 45 minutes making a meal of rice and vegetables only to sit beside it for two hours, shaking, unable to take a single bite.  That no one else had spent all night lurching at noises, wondering if they would survive their wildest thoughts, their cruelest voices.  But there were so many of us.  Stealth-cookers.  Hunger-trickers.  Day-sleepers.  Feelers of so many feelings.  In a room without doctors, our collective vulnerability became a kind of superhuman strength. 

     By the end of our fifth day in Delhi, all of us volunteers were either shitting constantly or not at all.  Every piece of food and bottle of water was a potential poison.  One of the volunteers had seen mice scampering over the clean dishes we ate off of at the second flat.  Another said Hari had given her a bottle of water that seemed “tampered with.”  Every woman had a theory of why we were constantly getting sick.  Someone had read in a guidebook that one day of breathing Delhi air was like smoking 35 cigarettes.  Another woman insisted Hari was lying about the mudslides in order to buy more time to secure our lodging and volunteer assignments which were supposed to already be in place.  I didn’t know what to make of Hari.  We had come to India under the umbrella of his organization, so he was our host, partially responsible for our health and safety.  But we’d also signed on to have a full-fledged India experience, so what was the problem with insects and vermin?  Contaminated plates?  How could Hari not resent us, with our petty demands for safety-sealed water bottles and hygienic dishes?

     Just when my body began to scare me with its hollowness, my diarrhea stopped, and Hari announced the mudslides were cleared.  We would head into the mountains the following morning.  The drive would take 10 hours in two jeeps.  In the mountains, the living conditions were more favorable.  “More Western,” Hari said.  Sit-on toilets and fresher air.  Our volunteer cottage was nestled within a peach orchard.

     That night, I woke to the sound of vomiting.  When I looked to my right, Holly was gone.  I listened and waited.  I walked to the bathroom door.

     “You okay?” I asked.

     “There’s no toilet paper,” she said.

     I went on a hunt in the dark, careful not to step on sleeping bodies.  In the kitchen, I found a few paper towels.  I cracked open the bathroom door and slipped them through.

     “Can I get you anything else?”

     She said, “Just stay close.”  

     I sat on the ground.  When the noises became too much, I plugged my ears.  I wondered when I would catch it, if I was going to.  Finally, she stepped out and walked to her sleeping bag.  I got into mine, turning away so I wouldn’t breathe her breath.  

     In the morning, the jeeps honked for us.  We stuffed our luggage into the backs.  Holly got into one.  I got into the other.  I was still worried about her, but a selfish part of me was relieved not to be squashed beside her.

     We drove until the crowds thinned, and the passing public buses no longer tipped with men dangling off bumpers, swinging from the roofs and sides.  Sometime in the afternoon, trees began to outnumber people.  We crossed into a region of climbing roads, peaks and valleys, where bright blue rivers cut through swaths of sloping green.  When I rolled down my window, the air had changed.  To inhale was like guzzling a bottle of cool water.  We drove past a line of buffalo, and I watched one veer too close to the edge and send a pile of stones skittering 500 feet down.  I hoped Holly was awake, drinking in the changing landscape after a series of restorative naps.  Snow capped the mountains, and the green was a shade I’d only seen before in greenhouses, where the sunlight and rainfall are modulated, perfect.  I was an astronaut, viewing the earth from a million feet up, everything brand new and astonishing, and yet in order to take in this wonder, I’d needed to travel to a place so remote I couldn’t begin to calculate the miles and hours necessary to complete my trip back home.  

     When I arrived at the cottage, Holly was curled in a ball, hugging her knees.  I asked if I could get her anything.  She said, “Can you get me my mother?”  Tears streamed down her face.  I remember the tears because the next day she could no longer make them.  Her crying was dry-eyed, and when she held out her arm and told me to squeeze, the imprints of my fingers remained long after I let go.  But this first night in the mountains, it was still possible all she needed was a good night’s rest.  I brought her a pillow and tucked it beneath her head.  I broke off a piece of a granola bar and placed it on a book beside her pillow.  I didn’t yet know how to take care of other people.  I was years away from becoming a wife, a mother, the daughter of a dying parent.  I left Holly to rest and, heeding the meal bell in the distance, climbed a half-mile up the mountain to the spot where the trees grew like magic beanstalks and opened to a small staff cottage where dinner was served.

     When I told Hari that Holly wasn’t coming to dinner, he said, “This happens in every group.  A woman gets sick.  She thinks she is dying.  In two days, she is up and about, and everything is well.”

     I said, “I think it’s food poisoning.”

     “Did you get sick?  Did I get sick?”

     “No,” I said.

     “So maybe it’s not.  Maybe it’s Holly.”

     At the hospital, we knew a girl was failing when she went from one day walking independently around the unit to the next morning coming to group in a wheelchair with thin plastic tubes carrying food into her stomach through her nose and throat.  The wheelchair wasn’t because she couldn’t walk.  It was because she was no longer allowed to walk, because walking required more calories than her body was able to part with.  Her heart, her lungs, her brain needed energy, too.  The nose tube food was brown, muddy, and liquid.  The tubes looked like skinny dead earthworms flung at a thin girl’s face.  Once a woman or girl was plugged into nose tubes, I had a hard time speaking with her, laughing with her, even looking at her.

     Nose tubes said: This girl is starving and killing herself, and you can’t fix it.

     Nose tubes said: Some of these women will never escape this disease.

     During my time in the hospital, two girls got nose tubes.  They were petite wisps to begin with, and the tubes made their nostrils flare and their noses stick out like the fleshy beaks of geckos.  Jenny wasn’t a nose tube girl, but as our days wound down, it became clear we were on different tracts.  I was nervous to leave the hospital because I was afraid my newfound appetites for food, life, and connection would desert me once I was cut free from the program’s strict routines.  Jenny was afraid to leave the hospital because her home was violent.  The people she loved hurt her, with fists.  I didn’t know what to do with this information now that I was so close to release.  The day before Jenny left, I made her a blue duck out of Sculpey clay.  I gave it to her to take home.

     In the mountains, I travelled with a translator and carried a long list of personal questions to ask local women about their bodies.  Who gets to make decisions about your health?  When you get your period, what do you use to catch the blood?  Do you practice family planning?  Would you like to?  I remember a woman laughing hysterically when asked if her husband used condoms.  A self-proclaimed sorceress describing how she up-ended her uterus so no man could knock her up.  Girls and women describing the rags and rolls of fabric they bled into and buried in landfills only to find in the teeth of dogs the next day.  Mostly, I remember the imbalance of these conversations, the skin-crawling feeling of walking into a woman’s private home and asking her to share intimate details about her body while I read questions from a protocol and shared nothing about myself.  

     I didn’t think of Holly until I was back in the jeep, ascending the roads winding up to the peach orchard.  She was in the bathroom when I returned.

     “You can open the door,” she said.

     She sat on the floor in a T-shirt.  She couldn’t pee or cry.  She showed me her modeling clay skin and her belly, which had bloated to the size of a beach ball even though she hadn’t eaten in two days.  

    “Why is it doing that?” she asked.  “Why is my body blowing up when I can’t keep anything down?”

     She told me Hari thought she was homesick, that it was all in her head.  

     “Do you?” she asked me.  “Do you think it’s all in my head?”

     “It’s everywhere,” I said.  “It’s all of you.”  

     I thought it was clear Holly needed medical attention right away.  

     It was almost dinner.  I hiked up to the staff cabin, found Hari in the kitchen, and said, “Holly needs a doctor.  It’s bad and getting worse.”

     He lifted the lid off a pot and peered inside.  “This will taste good.  You like it.  Okra, yes?”

     I repeated what I’d said, only louder and with more frustration, and again he looked me over, head to toe, like I’d said nothing significant, and said, “Please go have fun.  You worry too much.”

     I remember looking outside the window at the beanstalk trees and wanting to hack them down, shred them into splinters, torch them with fire.  When I returned to the cottage, Holly was sleeping.  A volunteer sat beside her, massaging the arches of her feet.  I sat down, too, and the volunteer and I talked about hiking up the mountain, stealing one of the jeeps, whisking Holly away.  Or calling the US office, demanding better treatment.  Others gathered and, equally concerned, tossed out similar schemes of confrontation, kidnapping, theft.  In the end, we decided to wait and see what the night would bring.  It was not as if we knew the back roads or the hospitals or even how to make an international phone call or drive a stick shift.

     In the middle of the night, Holly began vomiting again.  We turned her on her side so she wouldn’t choke.  We looked for blood but didn’t see any.  I offered to hike up to the staff cabin, to wake up Hari and demand his help.  Sanjay volunteered to come with me, as did another volunteer.

     The trail up the mountain was narrow and bouldered, and only when we encountered a herd of goats sure-footing it down, did we step to the side and stop to briefly form a plan. Sanjay would be our mouthpiece because he was our only male.  The other woman and I would wait outside.  I fired off a list of all the things Sanjay needed to say, to do.  

     He touched my shoulder.  “I’m on your team,” he said.

     I don’t remember how long we were out there waiting.  I heard the rumbles of men talking but not arguing.  Why weren’t they arguing?  Why were they so civil with each other when they could be so dismissive and condescending with us?  I wanted to scream but I didn’t want to seem hysterical.  Finally, Sanjay stepped out and indicated the discussion was finished.  Hari would send a car in the morning.  

     At dawn, one of the jeeps pulled up beside the volunteer cottage.  Holly was run-down but awake.  We’d packed her bags.  Two men guided her into the back seat.  We clustered around the vehicle, and one of the men told us the nearest Western hospital was five hours away.  Holly would need volunteers to sit with her and feed her since most Indian hospitals didn’t have staff for this.  Two of us could go with her.  From the back seat, Holly looked to me.  I remember her eyes.  They were wide and chocolate-colored with long, perfect lashes, even then.  I looked down the road at the rocks and pebbles.  I didn’t offer to go.

     After I left the eating disorder program, I wrote the girls and women letters and tried to stay in touch.  I wrote Jenny about a crush I’d developed on a guy I’d seen photocopying documents at the office where I was temping.  I sent the nurses fleece blankets to put in the common room for future shivering girls.  I wrote a girl named Mary Ann that I missed her sense of style and hoped she worked things out with her boyfriend even if he didn’t understand what she was going through.  These were skipping-stone letters that danced over the secrets we’d shared in locked rooms.  Running so hard you blacked out.  Eating only oranges.  Wanting to live.  Wanting to die.  

     No one wrote back.  I don’t know why this surprised me.  Maybe it would have been different if we’d all had Facebook, Instagram, if I still remembered last names.  Maybe we would have all remained virtual friends, though it would have been difficult to see, through updates and snapshots, who got better and who vanished.  

     I returned to the hospital a month after I left for a public talk on recovery.  I went with my mom and saw some of the other girls and women with their mothers, sisters, and friends.  I didn’t see Jenny, whom I longed to see the most.  Maybe the cross-state travel deterred her.  Maybe she didn’t have a support person to bring.  I said a quick hello to the other women and sat beside my mother, knowing the sisterhood I’d shared with the other girls was already gone.  Some of us were moving forward.  Some of us were treading water.  Some of us were sinking down.  To try to hold on too long was to risk getting pulled back under.

     Seven days after the jeep took Holly away, the volunteers who’d accompanied her returned to the mountains and shared what they’d seen.  Doctors had gotten Holly’s vomiting under control.  She’d received IV fluids.  Pigeons had swooped in through her hospital room windows.  Chickens had clucked in the halls.  Holly rarely spoke.  In the bed beside her, a woman with ulcers elbowed a woman with tumors for more sheets and more space.  Slowly, Holly got better, but she never got well.  Her father flew in from Kentucky.  A decision was made to take her home.  She was already out of the country, across oceans.  In my mind, I saw every moment of it, especially my absence.

     These days, my memory conflates them.  Holly is in the eating disorder program with me, and Jenny finds the money to buy a plane ticket to India.  Lying on sleeping bags, the three of us talk about foods we’ve eaten we worry might make us sick.  We poke fun at our shit schedules, our growling bellies.  We laugh when we are outraged.  We laugh when we are humiliated or over-stressed.  Then one of them needs me, and I turn away.  Sometimes I worry I’ve constructed my whole life around illness avoidance, around doing everything possible not to breakdown mentally and physically again.  

     I wonder where they are now, if Holly married her college sweetheart, has a houseful of bright-eyed kids.  I wonder if Jenny left her hometown and found a person who adores her dark, delicious sense of humor.  I wonder how they feel inside their bodies.  What they eat, what they don’t eat, what they do when they are scared and alone.  What they think of when the world feels too vicious to withstand.  I think of them.  I think of all of us, the imperfect ways we protect ourselves and survive.