I know distance more than I know company, and when my family pinches at the fat around my waist I am taken back to the motherland for a brief moment. my grandmother is sitting in the backyard, drinking the cafe bustelo my mother sent her and smiling, she beckons me towards her and I set on her lap blissful and naive to what the next twelve years of my life will become. the moment ends almost as quickly as it started and my aunt is questioning if I eat enough at home, my cousin is grimacing as her curves are compared to the angles my body is made out of and both of our bodies have become spilled coffee stains on the floor for other people to step on; everyone in my aunt's too small kitchen is laughing and I feel as if somebody had set me on fire. my skin begins to feel like paper and my skeleton becomes full of the debris I tried so desperately to sweep under the rug my twelve year old insecurities come flying out again like a genie from a magic lamp simply by the sound of drunken family laughter and I cannot breathe. I have never smoked before but in that moment I swear there is not oxygen in the world and my lungs are filled with tobacco made from the scars on my body that never healed and nicotine-like unspilled tears. my cousin is blushing and I know that it bothers her that her father's friend is staring at her in a way less than appropriate because it bothers me that my father's friend is staring at me as if I were a blow up doll made simply for his pleasure. the twelve year old inside of me, filled with insecurities is screaming with shame but the fourteen year old me is sighing because she knows- we've been through this process so many times we know it by heart, it is wrong but it is to be expected and the newly fifteen year old girl I have become stays silent. I pretend that my aunt's sharp fingernails poking me don't feel like knives, I smile and laugh with them, when my aunt says that my hips are finally growing in I do not say that this is not an accomplishment, that my body growing is not a trophy for the public to stare at. instead I nod and feel my throat constrict with anger so immense it is like a monsoon inside of me. but I do not speak. my obedience has become a habit too hard to break. I know distance more than I know company because even if my body is an abandoned home that grows only weeds in the backyard it is my abandoned home.