Letting In the Goddess
Eden Borden, Third Place
What I didn’t know was that it was
never a sin to love myself.
Standing bare and vulnerable in front of my mirror, a woman I’d never known stared back at me. The silhouette of a being much more powerful than me was creeping out of the shadows. I had long lived in the presence of a goddess, but who possessed no shrine, no patron, and no fanfare. I’d long ignored her inhabitance, waiting for someone to come and awake her from the dust and rattle her bones back into existence. I forsook her. In first grade, I stood in line at the end of recess, waiting for our teacher to come receive us. A voice arose out from the fourfoot crowd. “Eden Borden is fat!” I whipped my head around and saw a boy, lifted up by [ 120 ]
his friends, laughing down at me. My first public humiliation. Two years later, after a similar incident, I found myself at my teacher’s desk near tears. “Mrs. Barnes, I hate it. I hate my body.” The old woman who was my eccentric third grade teacher pulled me into a hug then wrapped her shawl around me as we took a lap around the classroom. I leaned into her plump side. After much contemplation, Mrs. Barnes came out with a most peculiar response. “If we went on a field trip across the ocean and our boat sank, you would float.” Puzzled, I met her eyes. “If we took a tour of the Sahara Desert and got lost, everyone else would die off faster. You’d probably survive. Me too, of course.” She let out a merry laugh and patted her tummy. Morbid as it was, I took comfort in her words. I could sleep well knowing that at the very least, I’d outlive my tormentors. When you’re bigger, no one wants to tell you. It’s like it’s a secret that they don’t think you’re aware of. As though you haven’t endured insults, being spat on, or punched in the face. At fourteen, my friends and I held a Halloween party. I’d dressed up as the BBC Sherlock Holmes, despite the fact that blazers were no match for my broad shoulders. All of us being actors, the night was filled with roleplay, games, and pranks. One of them being that one of my girlfriends and I pretended to be possessed. While we were doing this, the boy I had a crush on picked up my suit
