Ready for you to eat.

When you're seven, eating is happiness. It's a great relief to fill your belly and walk quietly around with a dog-eared copy of The Bridge to Terabithia and understand the world through death's lens. Not a lot of people would understand that about a child, except your mother knows you're not like the other ones, and you often wonder what you're like to her. A fine China bowl, a raging bull in the China cabinet, or just another person whose feelings are tucked so far inside themselves, she's forgotten they exist?

When you're thirteen, eating is a bad habit. Your body betrays you and becomes the woman you're not ready to be. The boys like you. A lot. They're curious about all you can't control and darkly feed with sugar between your teeth and a chemical tongue. When you wear shorts, you get honked at and when you go swimming you get leered at, so your only reprieve is reading words until they stack so high in your head, you can climb them, going up, up, up and out to anywhere but here.

When you're sixteen, eating is the enemy. Your head is a dark place. You hear about a woman drowning her own children and everyone is aghast at this, but not you. You harbor this little beast inside you, and you deeply understand how evil can gnaw the core right out of a once-sane mind. You sit in your closet and you gulp and cry big tears when you read the books your school has assigned you. A panic attack. That's what it's called but you just know it by the way your body insists you suffer. You eat nothing but carrots, and frozen grapes, and little pockets of air that you swallow as you run your worries away in the hot Houston sun. Maybe you'll become a puddle that'll soak through the sidewalk and run dutifully down the drain so nobody knows where you've gone, not even you.

When you're twenty, eating is an antidote. You've drunk yourself stupid again, and food is the remedy that soaks all that stupid right up. You are ineptly beautiful. The kind of pretty that gets you stopped in the street so men can tell you straight to your face. This isn't the best kind of attention for an introverted feminist, so you scowl and pretend you walk with a limp. You write poetry and eat your words up through the week, so full of yourself because you're the best writer in your classes and your professors blatantly tell you this immeasurable truth in front of your peers. So, you start to look down at people who aren't as pretty or as smart or as well-dressed or as anything as the girl who vomited up all those words in the toilet last night and watched them whirl themselves away.

When you're twenty-seven, eating is a trend. You put your family through the rigorous act of veganism, cutting all animal products from your vocabulary, excising your memory of medium-well hamburgers and charred hotdogs on the grill. You become a culinary queen of all things plant-based, your cart the cleanest in Whole Foods–a source of pride with that baby strapped to your chest who will one day proudly grow her own herbs and purchase sustainably-sourced seaweed. Your hair has never been shinier, your skin has never been clearer, your belly has never rumbled louder, and your deception has never been as opaque as the glass of almond milk still sweating at the side of your sink.

When you're thirty-eight, eating is a gift from God. You've gained weight in your hips and your thighs and no longer wear the size zero you have worn all these years, sometimes easily, sometimes fitfully as if conquering hell. You instead embrace the imperfection of yourself because it's a losing battle anyways and also because that battle's already been won by someone who's not you. You calculate your past, flick it into order like a deck of cards, and start to realize your need to control your body because something had to be controlled, didn't it? But sitting now in the warm summer air, you smell the truth most clearly and understand on a whole new level that you're not the one who is in control and never have been. And so, you rest in the One who is, listening for the timer to tell you the bread is baked and ready for you to eat.