Small Acts of Disappearance Read Online Free

borderless, I didn’t know where witnessing stopped, and I began.
    I kept a notebook in my first days in the hospital, but barely touched it. As I listened to the other women talk, hesitantly, at times angrily, often in tears, and I heard them voice so many of the things that I’d kept so long silent in myself, I knew immediately that it could never be my place to write about them, to speak for them, to use their stories to add colour to my own. I realised that these women were some of the bravest but also most vulnerable that I had ever met, and that to turn them into kooky characters in my writing would not only violate the privacy that the hospital was so careful to protect for us, but also do them violence. I realised, at last, that this story was not about them, but about me – even as I’d been denying that fact for years.
    Under the hospital’s supervised schedule of meals, I was suddenly forced to be without my hunger, and I walked out of the building every afternoon feeling skinless, almost painfully permeable. I walked down Broadway, the shuddering of trucks and passing buses vibrating through my bones, the footpath crumbly and frayed. I sometimes caught my reflection in the dark shop windows and was shocked by the glassiness of my own face. I’d buy a cold drink at the Hot Devil Bakery, defiantly sugarfree and fizzy. I’d sit quietly on the bus – I’d been forbidden to walk home, in case even this small act of exercise was a compulsion – and press my fingers against the stiff fibres of the seat, the cracked rubber seal of the window. These grubby, communal surfaces were a kind of landing pad. I couldn’t change frequency so easily.
    Because inside the hospital we were contained. Inside, no one could find what we said unimaginable. No one could think us stupid or indulgent or precious. No one was horrified when we cried over our plates of ravioli, limpid and almost visceral in its red sauce.
    Our days, at least, had in-built structure. We arrived in time for morning tea and left forty-five minutes after afternoon tea, with lunch at 12:30 sharp. We were carefully watched during our meals: no breaking food up into little pieces, no eating food in any set order, no dunking biscuits in tea, no over-use of condiments, no counting chews, no reading labels, no tiny bites, no one thing left on the plateat all. Our meals were time-limited, with warnings given when we had ten, and then five minutes to go. One woman ate so slowly and tearfully that she had to shovel in most of her meal in overloaded forkfuls in those last minutes. Another tried to hide a whole potato in her pocket. We all hugged our stomachs and were silent after every meal. There was a grey box of tissues in the corner of the room.
    We were weighed once a week, wearing pale-yellow paper gowns with elasticised cuffs and open backs, facing away from the numbers on the scale. We kept our gowns in a metal locker with ventilation gills, in zip-lock bags designed for storing food, our names written in texta on the label on the front: Contents: Fiona. Each afternoon, we picked up breakfast cereal, canned fruit and longlife milk in a brown paper bag to have for breakfast before we left home the next day. I turned the cereal into cookies and the tinned pears into cinnamon muffins and fed them to my family and friends. I didn’t want to eat them, and couldn’t bear to waste them, but the people I would give them to, I knew, would never think them a burden.
    Every week, once a week, we were escorted outside, to practise eating in the world, where we knew our meals would not be correctly measured by a dietitian, where we’d have to choose, and where we could not be contained. Our first excursion was to a café on Glebe Point Road, we walked in the hot and stagey light of mid-afternoon, unspeaking, and in a raggedsingle file. I bit my lip, and felt it, full and sweet between my teeth. A dalmatian on a leash was