The Girl in the Café in Nîmes

A girl collapsed in a café in Nîmes. Her parents were trying to hand her a single chocolate bar—the most ordinary act of parental anxiety—and she refused it while her body gave out beneath her. Teresa Bücker, a German blogger who was there on holiday, watched it happen and tweeted about it: An anorexic girl collapsed next to us in Nîmes. It hurts. In Germany, roughly one in five young people suffers from an eating disorder.

One in five. It’s the kind of statistic you read and immediately allow to become abstract, because the alternative is sitting with it.

The machinery that produces this runs without interruption. Magazines, posters, the corners of the internet devoted to treating starvation as an aesthetic—the pro-ana accounts with their progress photos and motivational captions, curated by people who are dying slowly and encouraging others along. The platforms observe it. The advertisers continue. The ideal stays fixed.

What happened in that café wasn’t rare. That’s the thing you can’t put down.