By Frankie Lonergan II
I guess I don’t really know how it started. I noticed it one day when I was getting dressed. My pants didn’t fit me anymore. I just figured I was losing weight because of all the stress at work. Losing weight isn’t the worst thing ever, but I didn’t feel thinner or even healthier. My diet hadn’t really changed. I was eating the occasional salad, but I wasn’t being particularly mindful of what I did and didn’t eat. The average 31-year-old wants to lose weight, so I just brushed it off. For as long as I could remember, my weight had always fluctuated, but I was down to 160 pounds. I hadn’t weighed 160 since freshman year of high school. I really hadn’t grown much since then, so it wasn’t that visibly noticeable. I felt as healthy and spry as ever. Then I noticed that I kept having to tie my shoes tighter and tighter just to keep them on. It wasn’t just my waistline. My feet were getting smaller too. I didn’t really have many friends when this whole ordeal started, and I most certainly didn’t have a girlfriend, so there was nobody there to see the progression from day to day. My chair at work started feeling a little bit bigger, as if somebody were adding a quarter inch to the bottom every day. The weather started to turn, and I busted my winter coat out of the closet. Much to my chagrin, but unfortunately not much to my surprise, it was about a size too big. I’d always been on the smaller side, so clothes being too big for me wasn’t uncommon. Suddenly my car seemed bigger, my coworkers taller, and my bed vast and empty.
I decided to call my brother to see what he thought. He said that I seemed stressed out and that it was probably nothing, but I nevertheless demanded he come see for himself. I opened the door and his face dropped immediately. My little brother dwarfed me. He threw me in the car and we sped off to Dr. Barnhardt’s office. I sat on the cold wax paper cover of the inspecting table while he prodded my tongue with the depressor. He told me everything was normal, and until my blood work came back, they’d have no idea what was wrong with me. At first glance, the only thing different about me was that I was two inches shorter than I had been at my annual checkup six months prior. Two weeks later, my blood work came back clean. There was nothing wrong with me except for the fact that I was shrinking at an alarming rate.
That was two months ago now. I’ve shrunk four inches since then. This time last year, I was five feet six inches. I’m currently five foot nothing. I’ve seen the doctor three times in that period, and every x-ray, every CT scan, every possible test he could think of came back negative. Dr. Barnhardt called it the most astonishing thing he’d ever seen. I’ve just sort of accepted it by now. The hardest part is that I don’t know what the end result is going to be. Is the shrinking going to stop, or will I keep getting smaller until I disappear into nothing? At this rate, I could be completely gone within a few years. I’m not really scared. Being smaller has made my life easier in a lot of ways. My clothes are cheaper now. I’m never claustrophobic or cramped on the train. I can do tons of pull-ups because of how light I am. The sky looks prettier from where I am, if that makes any sense. I’m not sure it does. For whatever reason, I sleep better, I worry less, and I laugh more now that I’m down here. Pretty soon I’ll be in the four-foot range. I can’t wait.
