by Danielle Bonior
“I wish I was my shadow.”
Against the pulsing greens, reds, and blues of the Pantawan Christmas Carnival, our shadowed silhouettes lay ahead. Trudging across the crumbled pebbles of the parking lot, my cousin, in her early stages of youth, let those words fall at our feet, “I wish I was my shadow.”
“Ngano man?”, I asked, against the howling wind and salted sea air. Closer still to merry-go-rounds and haphazardly engineered ferris wheels, flickering lights danced against the darkness of our shadowed skin.
“My shadow is tall, skinny, devoid of color.”
At 14-years-old, the age when appearance seems to carry unbearable weight, her words gave me pause. Much like the distortions in a house of mirrors, those elongated reflections seemed to mock us. Long legs, pinched waists, unattainable symmetry. Bemused, I consider, no matter how tall or how skinny, our shadow would remain—taller and skinnier, than the body it tethers.
At 14-years-old, I felt much the same. I stood 5’1 and weighed 50 kilograms, not overweight by any means, in hindsight. Yet, no matter how much I trimmed from my diet—how many meals I skipped—it never felt like enough. My inner thighs would rub together when I walked, chafing, bleeding, and thus I believed, for as long as my thigh had no gap, I was fat. Once, at a dinner party, a friend squished my arm in jest. I winced out a grin, but the next day, I refused to eat at all.
My reflection has passed through countless houses of mirrors since then, shrinking and stretching, fluctuating between extremes. Detached now from the mist that clouded my eyes at 14, I see her statement for what it is—what it was for me, at her age—a reflection of the expectations society hoists upon women to be a certain weight, at a certain age. This demand to fit into ever-changing molds of “enough.”
The shape of our shadows are transitory, fluctuating with the environment and the light which dictates circumstance. Now older, wiser, and definitely fatter, perhaps a new change of mindset is due—that we may offer our bodies the same mercy that nature affords the silhouettes that follow.
Shadows don’t carry that weight. They don’t agonize over appearance. They stretch and shrink without resistance, bound only by light, and not by the world’s gaze. And yet, even as I’ve outgrown that age, her wish lingers in me like the salted air: simple, sincere, and a little heavy.
