Everything began in a way that didnt quite feel real, almost as if I found myself wandering the misty streets of London at dusk, and the lamplight flickered over Emma and William as they drifted apart. Theyd been together since the days we all loitered outside the sixth form common room, with everyone certain they would end up married. William had loved Emma quietly for years, while she wavered like the Thames tideuntil she decided to give it a chance. In our last school year, they became inseparable, and William would joke, over steaming mugs of tea, about wedding bells and children scampering about. It was charmingly odd, and I must admit, I envied her a little.
Emma was slightly rounder than most, though she floated through life with a peculiar grace. William would sometimes offer a light comment about her fondness for Victoria sponge or too many biscuits with her tea, nothing sharper than the sudden chill of an English morning. The rest of us wouldnt dream of making a remark, but Williams jokesnever cruelseemed to slide right off everyones awareness except, of course, Emmas.
Even after we’d left school, Emma and I stayed in touch, and it was through me that the news arrived like thick London fog: William had left her. Both in their third year at university, already speaking seriously of marriage, when William, quick as a magpie, flew off after someone elsea tall, willow-thin girl, the kind youd expect to see on the cover of a glossy British fashion magazine, though, truthfully, I thought she had none of Emma’s charm. But what comfort could a heartbroken friend find in reason?
From then on, Emma began slipping into strange new habits, as if chased by shadows she could never quite see. She believed, in that curious dream-logic way, that if only she could lose a bit of weight, William might trace his steps back to her. She swapped bacon for porridge, dabbled in all manner of fad diets she found in womens weeklies, and obsessed over gym routines, until her days blurred into a carousel of counting and measuring and running, yet the scales refused to budge. Instead, her muscles grew, and nothing else seemed to change.
Our paths diverged for a while, as peoples do, and three foggy years drifted past. It was through her mother, over an uncertain phone call, that I learned of Emma once more. Shed withered down to a mere four and a half stone on a frame barely five foot. Since no dieting magic would work, shed simply given up on food entirely, as if living half inside a shadow.
William never came back, as anyone outside a dream might have guessed. Emmas hair deserted her, her strength faded, her job slipped through her fingers like sand through the cracks in the Tower Bridge, and the details of her old life peeled away. Her mother insisted on dragging her through round after draughty waiting room, facing a parade of GPs.
The next time I saw Emma, I simply couldnt recognise her. There was no trace left of the lively girl Id once knownher beauty vanished from her pinched, pale face, leaving only the question: why had it come to this? For a boy who couldnt watch his tongue and always had something to say about her weight…
Girls ought to know, even in the strangest of dreams, that a relationship where you never feel at ease is no true fairy-tale. It isnt love when it asks you to drain yourself empty, only to spend all those half-lit years afterwards wrestling ghosts of your own making.
