Written first in October 2022, then December 2023, and lastly June 2025.

There was a time I didn’t know what healing looked like. Not the typical and trendy version, but the quiet, slow kind, where your body forgets how to eat, and you forget how to sleep after meeting people. This is Mira’s story. It’s mine too. Maybe it’s a little bit yours.

Her name was Mira.

She stopped eating. The body forgets how when the soul goes quiet, like the smell of your first home after it burns down. That thick, slow dread settled deep in her stomach and refused to leave. A heavy, chemical silence clung to her skin, turning the air to glue from room to room, until it baked into the faded wallpaper, into the grain of the floorboards, into her lungs. And then it slipped deeper. Just a dull forgetting, the kind that spreads like smoke under a door and festers in the walls she kept inviting people into.

She’d go days. Two, three, a week. Three years of hardly eating.

And food became vaguely hostile. It lingered at the table like an old friend who talks too much when she bumps into you, with too many goddamn questions, and you wish she would stop reminding you she’s still there. Mira resented her for it. She’d nibble a cracker and sip a spoon of soup, then stare at the rest like a child who scraped her knees and forgot why she started crying.

“Eat something, you’ll feel better,” they said.

She looked at it like a dripping faucet left running in an empty house, the sink overflowing in silence. So insistently there, but a waste of space. And when the bread softened under the humid air, the kitchen smelled like a sick supermarket while she dug through something she never wanted to resurrect. Lukewarm and sweating in its bowl. Like a dog crying in front of the wrong house, or shoes she didn’t need anymore after she’d lost her feet.

She felt nothing for it. All she could think about was how loud everyone chewed, and how quiet the world would be if she left it.

* * *

Sometimes she wondered if she ever really came back.

Mira went somewhere in that relationship when she turned twenty. She left her body without even realizing she’d packed, and one day, she looked down and realized she hadn’t been living inside it for a very long time. “A younger me would’ve definitely turned away from who I became,” she thought. She had built a shrine out of suffering and called it love. That’s what we do when we don’t know better. Starve for it. Beg for it. Let it root rot in our bones.

They diagnosed her with anorexia and ARFID and handed her pills— twice daily, morning and noon. Two years later, binge eating disorder. A feast after famine, though both were just different kinds of famine with the same poisons and starvation. The psychiatrists gave their answers: punishment, self-loathing, a heart that wouldn’t beat for itself. They drew diagrams and passed her pamphlets and nodded solemnly like they’d solved her.

But none of it fit.

Mira didn’t feel any of that. She just wasn’t hungry and nobody believed her. So now she had to sit here and listen to those who think they’ve cracked the code. Across from her, a woman with kind eyes and a clipboard, someone who spoke gently but with the smug. Mira hated how she had to open her mouth and spoon-feed her pain in palatable soundbites just to be heard and labeled. She felt dissected. Diagnosed into a story that didn’t feel like hers. The room smelled faintly of lavender and printer ink, and Mira said what she was supposed to say. She had collapsed so far inward she forgot hunger, forgot space. And love? No, not love. She thought she did—but really, it had eroded who she believed herself to be. She folded in so tight she lost sight of the girl she once was whole. But more than anyone, she hated herself for letting him become a god in the ruins of her body.

But it wasn’t just him. It was the girls who drained her dry, who took and took and kept taking until their fake confessions came out. Then when they were called out, they wailed like saints caught in crisis, just like him, cloaked in victimhood (and victim complex so beyond comprehension) and denial so absurdly pitiful, it made her want to scream. People who’d reach out on a cliff and leave Mira dangling. But no. She didn’t hate them. It was too stupid to hold onto, and she didn’t have space in her heart for people so long gone with their own tragic stupidity that’s beyond saving.

Eventually, she got over it. Even rage gets tired of screaming.

The girl Mira used to be before she twisted her stomach inside out had to look at her and understand and see that she made it. Not all the way, but mostly honest and enough, at least. And the people who once knew her and really knew who she was in all those wild and broken and fun and beautiful phases, she still loved them. It’s in a weird, timeless way, like old handwritten Christmas cards you keep in a shoebox under the bed, impossible to throw away. And no matter how she felt about someone, she couldn’t keep them locked in the past or as warden to her memory prison. People could change. God knows she had, and she’d been all of it. She was too, the villain, the catalyst, the pushover, the naive, the stubbon, the sensitive, and the victim. Mira owned every messy piece of herself. But her therapist saw what Mira couldn’t admit: she hadn’t truly moved on from the pain. The way he twisted her mind until she doubted her own worth, the silent nights where she flinched at her own reflection, the sharp edges of his words. The scars ran too deep, and underneath it all, she couldn’t feel love for the body that had betrayed her so many times. That fractured relationship with herself, it was a slow-burning grief. And so yeah, her doctor had been right. Annoyingly though, was completely right. It was punishment. Self-hate. A heart that wouldn’t beat for itself, because she’d run out of people to blame and because she was only twenty-one, she let a single moment and a single boy devour her until even eating became a haunted act. But still, she tries. They wouldn’t understand a thing until it happens to them, and it’s something she wouldn’t wish upon anyone nor feel the need to explain. It’s terrible.

In the aftermath before healing started to take shape, Mira met boys who weren’t ready to hold anything real. Boys with hands that wandered and hearts that didn’t. They wanted her laughter and her lightness, the version of her that was easy to hold and let go. People who flinched when she was too sad, too soft, or too hard to read. There was always that look, that flicker of discomfort in their eyes like she’d just spoken a language they didn’t care to learn. And she knew that look well. She mistook crumbs for connection and touch for tenderness. Well, they were all silly stuff, never cruel. Still, they were very good people, people she still respects. Just not the people she should have let in. You know, the careless way young people often are, lost in the search for someone right before they’ve figured out who they are, and deep down, Mira knew that. It’s a strange thing watching your softness get interpreted as inconvenience. She just wasn’t healed enough to walk away, and she wanted warmth in people who didn’t know how to offer it.

After one of those boys left, Mira didn’t feel heartbreak. No sobbing or dramatic calls to friends. She never found anything in particular from anyone, and was surrounded by a blank space that should’ve mattered more. Her mind still buzzing, body still unsure of itself, but nothing cruel enough to sting. Just a quiet fade-out. She picked up a book. A small paperback, its corners slightly curled, forgotten by time and touched by many hands. It talked about the essence of love. That love was not bliss. Not pleasure. Not romance soaked in candlelight and perfect mornings that sweep you off your feet. That we have learned to chase intensity and call it intimacy, expecting it to be full of love and light, yet in truth, true love is all about work, and people tend to misunderstand the place of love and confuse the butterflies into making it more blissful than the work.

A line stuck with her. “The radical act of staying.”

And Mira stood frozen in the back corner of that bookstore. She closed the book and held it to her chest like it’s something sacred. Then she left without buying it. Not because she didn’t want it, but because it had already done the job. She thought about all the times she was praised her ambition, who said “you’re different” but really meant “I don’t understand you.” She thought about the nights she craved the heat and the sparks and the unbearable gravity of someone who could love her fully and honestly. But love isn’t supposed to sweep you away. It’s supposed to keep you steady.

And so in that quiet moment, she started choosing herself. Earnestly healing, seeing people for who they were in every action they took. And maybe that was the beginning. The part where she stopped waging war on her body in hopes to shrink so small enough to disappear behind the shadows of her past.

Choosing herself meant feeding her soul and her body, with patience and presence and forgivenes harder than any battle she'd fought.

And that was the hardest, bravest work of all.

* * *

Now,

Mira’s decorating her new room. It breathes differently here. There’s a black Scandinavian desk she built with her own hands: sleek lacquers, steel legs, clean angles. Above it, a small scattered gallery with tickets from MoMA and the Met, a tiny sticker from a jazz bar in Brooklyn—the kind where a sax player wore sunglasses indoors and serenaded you with a quartet. A pin from her favorite artist, Christian Kuria, and polaroids with people she loves, love notes folded in half.

There’s a lamp with a shade like steeped linen or the inside of an almond shell. Soft, warm, and quietly luminous. Next to it stands a black shelf that doesn’t really match her aesthetic but she loves anyway. The walls are painted in perfect sage and the bathroom gleams off-white under a skylight—beautifully European-styled, still bare in corners as if the space is still getting to know her. She tapes up a few more photos, slips them into sleek black and silver frames, and sets a bundle of preserved birthday flowers on her nightstand.

Her vinyls spin: Mitski, Harry Styles, Daniel Caesar, Clairo. They sound like her.

Her roommate is nice and fun. She laughs easy and kind, and they cook side by side with music playing Fleetwood Mac or Laufey. They swap leftovers and memes, and Mira feels like she’s finally living with someone she might grow old friends with. Really laughing over something dumb and small and beautiful. One day, maybe they’ll be two women in their sixties, sending each other photos of Thai curry on Sundays, texting “remember when…” from miles apart. That kind of bond.

The weather is warm, golden almost, and the city feels like somewhere she loves. A place she knows younger her would’ve loved seeing.

Mira is seeing someone now. He’s a boy who doesn’t make her cry or flinch at her quirks or even when she goes off on a tangent about nostalgia and melancholy and her obsession with art. He listens, really listens, like her thoughts are his favorite song. He loves that she truly loves everything she touches, that her eyes light up when she talks about feelings and the people, and he never rushes her when she gets a little lost in it.

She used to hide these. Back then, she’d pretend she didn’t know what an S&P 500 was or dabble in stocks at all, so she could let them explain it with a smug certainty (because they would, anyway). She’d nod, smile, play the role. Laugh when they joked about crypto, suffer through EDM and Joji, maybe Daniel Caesar on a good day, keep things surface-level. It was safer to feel a little stupid than to be too much.

But now there’s someone different. He doesn’t need her to shrink herself, and around him, she doesn’t have to pretend to be less and to want less either. And that’s what startles Mira the most—that she feels completely safe. Almost unnerving, but in the best way. He buys her the best meals because she once said she wanted to gain weight. That it’s her long-term goal to recover what was lost and he remembered. He lets her cry without rushing to fix it. They talk dreams, their careers, and the embarrassingly human stuff. Sometimes she looks at him and doesn’t flinch away from how good it is. And she smiles at the thought of him.

She eats when she’s hungry. Leaves the house by herself to read at the park, and comes back with flowers on the weekends, a bouquet of daisies and peonies, they’re her favorites.

The pills are now tossed.

Mira is still here.

And this time, she brought herself back.

Warmly hugging girls like Mira—
the ones who’ve spent years apologizing for taking up space they had every right to.

-Christa