I stare at my naked body in the mirror of my bathroom, and feel the beads of hot water clinging to me and running down my skin, still wet from the shower. My hair is clumped together in separate strands, tangled, coiled into ringlets around my shoulders and collarbone that the excess water drips from.

My hands find their way to my stomach and gently poke at the skin there, as a doctor would, to evaluate how much fat covers how much muscle. My lips turn down into a frown of their own accord.

I turn to the side to look at my profile and cradle my abdomen in my hands. My eyes slide over my body, melancholic, and I move my arms to my side in order to get a better view.

When I relax everything out, no conscious and no natural flexing of the muscles there, the fat over my stomach protrudes in a way that makes me feel as if it is dwarfing my pelvic bone and breasts.

Admittedly, it may only seem so to me because I am hyperfocused on the fat.

I can't help but suck in and tense, making everything compact and more toned. When I do that, there is a perfectly straight line from my ribs to the V of my hipbones, just a slight amount of flab on my lower abs, protecting my core; the normal amount. Or, maybe not the normal amount, but the amount that I want to be normal. Maybe my ideal normal is much different from reality's normal; maybe my idea of normal is warped, getting me into a destructive mindset where my thoughts rip myself apart. I can't be sure. But I try to suck in even more, to see what I would look like without even that small-but-visible layer of fat and skin, and even though it is uncomfortable and I can't breathe without letting the fat fall back out, and it feels like I may bruise my intestines by doing so, I like myself better that way. Pushing my stomach in and out, in and out, the contrast between the body I have and the body I want becomes clear.

I hate myself. And I can't talk to anyone about it.

People tell me I don't need to lose weight because I am "already skinny as it is." Not skinny enough.

"Catnip, I like you like this," Gale might say as he playfully shoves me. But I don't like me like this.

I can't imagine how other girls obtain those perfect bodies, whether they are movie stars, or personal trainers, or classmates, or my neighbor. I don't know how they do it, but the only way I can think of doing it, too, is unhealthy. I know it is. But every morning when I wake up and look at myself in the mirror and remember, yet again, that there is no perfectly flat plane of my body, from my ribs to my pubic bone, I feel a twinge inside myself; every day when I find myself slouching, gravity can't even pull everything in to make my stomach hollow. That's how it would be if, standing, my stomach were flat. Every time someone tells me that I'm so skinny, so pretty, so tiny, it feels like a lie because I know that they are wrong and I know that they don't see what I am really like and I know that they have no idea that I make it a living to fold it all up inside myself when people are watching me.

No matter what I do or what people say, I always feel self-conscious and fat. Ugly. Bad.

I feel like such utter crap. I want to be that perfect girl on the cover of magazines, and I want to be that perfect girl walking down the beach in that one movie, and I want to be that perfect girl who matches her skintight dress with her confidence. Talking to friends, the ones who don't give a flying fuck what others think, the ones who have accepted their own skin, I wish I could be more like them. I want to love my body, to accept it for what it is and look forward to what it can be, to thank my body for all that it does for me... but somehow I just can't find it in myself.

I want a perfect body, and I don't know how else to get it.

Shifting around in front of my bathroom mirror, wallowing as I do every time I look at myself exposed like this, I realize that.

So I, Katniss Everdeen, the girl in love with food, begin to starve myself.