CW Eating Disorders

At thirteen I took a hit of LSD from a stranger at a mall. I stuck it to my tongue and held on tightly to my head because it kept trying to get away from me. A duck flew across the moon like Santa and his sleigh. My friends escorted me away from the mall to the canal where we all did drugs and talked about the three-eyed fish living in the water. They only came out when it was dark and once our shit kicked in. 

“My hands are squirrels!” 

Adrian, a regular at the canal, was digging into the ground ferociously searching for acorns. His skin was yellow and clammy, like forgotten cheese. I gazed into the holes he made in the ground and back at his hands that were covered in dirt and blood. 

“Do you like it on the rocks?” he asked flirtatiously, which was the most sexy anyone could be on acid.  

A friend at the canal had her mother pick us up and drove me home from the mall. Her car was full of handles and buttons aching to be pressed and buckle contraptions for me to contemplate. The backseat enveloped me in soft caramel nylon as the engine hummed under my seat. 

“Beck? We are here. Are you gonna get out?” her mother asked.

I looked out the car window at my house. The day my dad left, the house sighed. It grew a wind chime and flowers. The lighting on the porch was yellow-green, like a two day old bruise. 

I pulled on the door handle and swung forward, tumbling out of the car and spilling onto my driveway. Road pebbles embedded into my palms, citron fruits for hands. What was I supposed to do with these things? The car drove off at some point and I eventually made it from the driveway to the front door. My hands cupped around the doorknob and I tried to remember if this was a time where righty-tighty lefty-loosey would apply. The door opened into a dark house, save for one light shining over the framed Magic-Eye 3D print in the hallway. Maybe I could finally see the picture now that I was on drugs. I was told it was a spaceship. Or was it an astronaut? I crossed my eyes and pulled my face away slowly. The purples and blues split off into worms and wiggled away from the frame and tadpole-spermed their way back again. 

I turned around, startled to see my father bent over in the dark. He stumbled toward me and fished for something in his pocket. My eyes fixed on his red cheeks as I clenched my jaw, trying desperately to do the best impression of my sober self. He pulled out a napkin from his jeans.

“I wrote down a joke I thought of. Something about Cheetos . . . I can’t read this shit . . . hahahaha, I don’t know, man . . . it was funny. Do you get it, though? C’mon, do you get it, though?” he mumbled. 

Did he tell a joke? What the fuck right now? I must be losing my mind. Should I just laugh anyway? It seems way too late to laugh now. It’s been like an hour. Standing still in time here with him.

I stomped away because my legs were so heavy and the stomping sounded so funny. STOMP STOMP STOMP!! WHOMP!!

My room was blue and heavy. I followed the patterns on my wall as they squashed into one another. The dancing textures broke my heart, weeping; almost begging me to put them out of their misery. 

*    *     * 

I worked after school at an ice cream shop and when customers would ask what a particular flavor was like, I would reply, Cancerous. I was so bitter, I swear I could spit acid. I hated everything and was always incredibly irritable. Anorexia will do that to you. 

I was closing the shop and waiting for a friend to pick me up after work. We were planning on taking MDMA at a party that night. I started stocking the toppings. I refilled the rainbow sprinkles and went into the walk-in refrigerator to get the peanut butter cups. 

Time disappeared. 

I came to and found myself shoveling the candy into my mouth by the handful. I screamed out loud and ran to the bathroom. I violently tried to make myself throw up. It wasn’t working. Nothing was coming up. My friend had come into the store and heard me. She banged on the bathroom door and burst in. She found me sobbing with my fingers down my throat. 

“Beckie! Oh my God! Are you okay? What happened??” she stammered. 

“I ate it. I don’t know how. I don’t know how much I ate. I can’t eat that . . . I don’t know what happened,” I replied woozily. 

We didn’t talk about it and went to the party. She parked her Jeep on the front lawn and we walked up the pathway to the front door. I smelled like sweet milk and bile. We entered the house and found everyone huddled in a circle around a little drug pile in the kitchen. Everyone had selected their decorated pill of choice and the one left on the table was for me. A speckled off-white little round pill with a half-assed off-center Mercedes Benz logo embedded on the front. 

“Is it okay? It looks a little dirty,” I asked no one in particular. 

No one answered, and I didn’t care. I swallowed the pill and sat by myself on the couch to wait. 

Oh fuck. 

All of the blood rushed down to my knees. Everything was tingly like my whole body had pins and needles. I fell to the floor and crawled my way to the bathroom to throw up. My friend was already in there petting the toilet paper and unraveling it like a cat.

“Oh my god, Bex. Feel this! It’s so soft . . .”

I maneuvered around her and stuck my head in the toilet, stroking the side of the porcelain bowl. One violent heave and there were the swirls of tan peanut butter and dark chocolate. I smiled with relief and cooled my face with the bathroom floor. 

I had to be starving or ready to burst. Manic or suicidal. Dead or alive. I craved constant distractions from myself. Otherwise I was completely numb. It wasn’t long before my mother felt the need to intervene. I acquiesced, half accepting that I was completely out of control. I was spinning around, blindfolded, and then shoved into a very expensive room to talk about my feelings. 

The eating disorders center wasn’t exactly enthused with my vegan lifestyle and tried to cram as much oily salad dressing as they could down my throat. “But how does that make you feel?” Um, like a lab rat? A foie gras goose, perhaps?

We had a family night at the center, where we all sat in a big circle with our loved ones and discussed eating disorders and treatment. My father sat with a creepy smirk plastered on his face as the other girls and their families cried and exchanged sentiments. I curled in a ball on a couch staring at him. 

“Well, I mean. Alls I know . . . Alls I do is pray. I mean, I found Jesus and I know everything is going to be fine with me and, you know, life, and whatever. That’s all you need to do. It’s that simple,” he blurted out. My father had never expressed an interest in religion, nor had he ever prayed before. I buried my face in the armrest and bit down. I couldn’t bear to witness the confusion and pity on everyone’s face. 

During my stay, I filled out food journals with embellishments of wholesome meals and drew detailed pictures of my feelings. I played the part, hoping to fake it enough so that I might even fool myself. I listened to the stories of the other women and then later, after group, they’d all explain how they would hide their disorder better when they got out. The motto of the facility was FEAR: Face Everything and Recover. It was displayed on the covers of our binders that contained worksheets and daily affirmations. I scribbled over the letters and replaced mine with FEAR: Fuck Everything and Run.         

Across the street from the center, there was an elementary school with a big field for recess. I sat on the sidewalk and pulled out a fresh pack of Marlboro Lights and slammed it against the heel of my palm. I smoked and watched the girls run around the playground, carefully studying these creatures who don’t obsess over their thighs touching each other or counting steps and calories and carbs. What do they even think about? My grandfather had given my mother a bottle of holy water inside of a plastic Virgin Mary bottle. He instructed her to give it to me so that I could drink it and it would cure me of my anorexia. I clutched onto it and found myself wondering if it were really that simple, if I would wonder about other things, important things, instead of trying to guess how many calories are in holy water.