56 kg and falling
I haven't eaten real food in two days and I feel like I am always on the verge of dizziness, flipping between being light-headed and totally lucid. I want to fade away, to become a bird, float above the world, just pissing down on all the stupid people who spend their lives making my life miserable.
Every evening at 6:30pm my dad forced us to sit around the heavy wooden table he made in an adult shop class he was taking. We had to hold hands and pray like little kids before every meal. Today he was saying thanks for all the love he received every day from his family, even though we hated each other. I couldn't wait to finish studying just so I could move away and never speak to them again, never be forced to sit around a table in silence while they argued.
I liked to close my eyes and take deep breaths of my food instead of eating it, to pretend I was chewing. I swear I could feel each piece go down my throat and make my stomach heavier. My mom was a pretty good cook but only with baking, not with regular food. I was practically 50 percent pastry. Was.
My culinary meditation annoyed my dad, but my mom just smiled and talked about a new size zero dress she saw.
I suppose you want to hear that my childhood sucked, or that there was some Freudian motivational factor that made me who I am. You want to hear that I was driven to desperate measures or that my mother abused me psychologically or my father sexually, but you will be disappointed. My mother was awesome. She was the one who taught me to cut my food into smaller pieces and drink water in between each bite so that I would feel full. She knew what she was doing, how to keep her size zero figure. She was my hero, my inspiration. My thinspiration.
It was my dad who was the problem in our little family unit, a health freak who demanded each of us eat exactly the right number of calories every day, regardless of how horrible the meal was, or how full we were, or what we were feeling. Who could live like that and not become a raging psycho?
I didn't have a problem. The truth is, I simply liked to experience the world, the taste of it, the smell of it. I drank in every cloud on the horizon and tasted every transient moment, food being just another life experience I wanted to savor in fine hallucinatory detail.
The first time I met Sophie, I admit, I didn't like her, especially her too-full-of-make-up pixie face, but she grew on me pretty fast. Even though she stole my best friend I didn't actually mind. Sophie and Ana were made to be friends, they liked to tease each other, they had the same type of self-control, the same sense of style, they could go days without eating if they wanted.
I loved to eat, no wait, oh my god, I lived to eat. Food was amazing. I loved the way pizza squelched in my mouth, crunched up against my tongue in sweet and salty bliss, the way chocolate ice cream changed flavor as it melted, how, when I closed my eyes, the dark creaminess enveloped my tongue and my whole being faded away into a solitary nothingness as it embraced that divine flavor, made immaculately by the gods Ben and Jerry.
Before I met Ana I was a chubby nobody, ostracized by most of the school, shunned by even the weird kids except for the nerds who clung to anyone different like a flock of frightened sheep. But who wanted to hang around with nerds? Ana showed me the way, and now I was dating guys I had only dreamed of. Men, real men. I finally felt worthy, the person I was supposed to be.
I even found a job at Dean's Stationary doing paperwork, not quitting in the first week like I had with every other project in my life. With my first pay-check Ana and I bought two big bags of candy at Lucky's. We walked out of the store like it was my birthday with two shopping bags full of sweet treats, not to eat, we would just chew and spit. You know, chew on it, taste it, and spit it out. Ana's idea. Spit enough candy and the sugar will make you high.
We sat on the floor in her apartment and binge-watched a full season of Vampirica, celebrating my wealth and freedom by not eating anything nutritious or counting calories, just having the best time. We propped a paper bag between us where we would take turns leaning in and spitting out the cream caramels, or the chocolate popcorn, or the peanut butter cups.
I didn't have Ana's self-control, but like Ana said, who needs self-control when you have a reverse gear?
Ana, my Ctrl+Z.
When life revolves around food every mealtime starts to feel further and further apart, life itself stretches out and becomes thin and transparent. Ana and I would find things to do to take our mind off the hunger, like talking shit about people, playing games, or playing games with people. Ana had this admirable ability to switch off the cravings, it was like she just decided what she wanted and it happened. I had to work at it. Every hour was a struggle. Me vs Food. Round 3, fight!
We were always bored and hated studying or hanging out at parties, so Ana and I decided to try an art class. I never cared much for art, but on point and edgy Ana was into it and I suppose it was something to do. I always wanted to try new things, new experiences. I didn't know if I could draw with any special talent other than the doodles scribbled on the reverse pages of study notes. I was nervous to find out and more nervous to find out if I would be asked to leave the room for being a complete ham-fisted wannabe.
In the first class I was concentrating so hard trying to draw straight lines that I did not notice the girl next to us until Ana slapped me on the arm and pointed. I looked up and felt the blood rush from my face. I recognized Sophie right away because I had seen pictures of her all over his social media. I recognized her face and freckles despite her messy hair, but she didn't know who I was. She didn't know I was the other woman.
Sophie was not the only person I recognized. Yup, had a twofer that night! When Bri, the art model, someone who went to school with me since I was eight years old, took off her robe with such royal performance I couldn't stop myself from laughing. I knew how much she thought of herself, how she wanted us to gaze upon her magnificent Sapphic beauty. Slutty, lesbian Bri, who always hung out with the young, vulnerable tweens who were questioning their identity, always nudging them towards her bed with little words and praises. Little manipulations. They would think she was 'oh my god so amazing', 'so awesome', 'so mature', 'a true hippie'. Mostly manic Bri, whose father had come out of the closet when she was sixteen, but Bri had come out long before that.
On Bri's thirteenth birthday she made an announcement to the school that she was not interested in boys and they were not permitted to talk to her any-more. She never understood why no one took her seriously after that. Bri spoke as if she was walking on a see-saw, always one wrong word away from tears, you always had to tiptoe around her feelings in case she exploded into a crying fit.
Now she bathed in the attention of her nakedness, I knew that Bri thought she was thin and beautiful now but Ana and I had passed her ideal months ago. To us she was just one of many people deluding themselves about their own misguided perception of true beauty.
"Mom!" I yelled from the bathroom. "Mom!"
"What is it? I'm late," my mom said, walking in to the bathroom while putting on her most expensive earrings – her dangling sapphires – a gift that had turned an anniversary fight into an evening of hell for me listening to them do whatever they did in their room until two in the morning. Tonight she was obviously going somewhere expensive with my dad. I already wanted to dig out the earplugs and build a soundproof pillow fort.
"Look at my throat." I pulled at the bottom of my gullet, the skin under my chin actually stretching. "Get it off me!" Some fat had appeared on me today from nowhere, and I wanted to scream and have my mother cut it off like she did with the fat on my steak, the skin on my neck under my chin literally hanging down far enough for me to grab it and stretch.
"You've been eating chocolate again."
"I haven't," I lied.
"Listen, I made you chicken for dinner. You can reheat it in the microwave, and there's some minty peas in the fridge in the white bowl. You like minty peas."
"Mom, you're not listening. I'm fat."
"Oh honey, just skip dinner then, okay?" She stood preening herself in the bathroom mirror behind me, adjusting her hair and tightening her bra straps. Jangling her sapphires.
Skip dinner, wake up thinner, how my mom had laughed when Ana told her that line. My mom laughed at anything Ana said. Ana was always coming up with little rhymes like that.
Why did my mom still preen herself for my father? They had been married for so long, surely anything interesting would have dried up by now. Their daily arguments proved they didn't even love each other, so what was the point of dressing up?
I hated myself for being so ugly. I cried on my bed for half an hour and before they went out my mom threw away my dinner and argued with my dad until he gave up trying to feed me.
I love her so much, she gets me.
"Have you seen Sue today?" Sophie asked me as we walked to English Lit, my favorite class because the lecturer annoyed everyone with her stutter and this entertained me.
Uh, hello, are we friends now? I thought.
Ana walked with us, her nose lost in her phone as usual, ignoring us but also reminding us she was the core, the focus of us.
"She didn't come in today," I said, still in that uncomfortable phase of having a new person in my life, still questioning whether I needed Sophie with her little quirks and little pixie face. "We have Social together first class and I didn't see her."
"I'm worried about her," Sophie said, "she was really moping around yesterday."
Sophie's voice bounced around the octaves whenever she got emotional about something, a nervous quiver that annoyed me. Pick a frequency, you dumb bitch.
"How could you tell?" Ana said, apparently listening to us and texting at the same time.
Sophie ignored Ana's comment and dialed Sue's number, but sighed in my general direction when no one answered, as if to scold me for her life not going perfectly.
"Look, I'm going to go over to Sue's house, something doesn't feel right," Sophie said.
"We have Lit now. Emo-girl can wait," Ana said, holding up her phone to take a quick selfie against the window where the light would shine through her hair and play around her high cheekbones. "Is that a new dress?" She asked, pointing her phone at Sophie and taking a photo.
"No. I've worn it a few times." Sophie smiled and posed like a fashion model, vogueing it up for the camera.
"It's probably just sitting tighter than usual, that's why I didn't recognize it." Ana clicked a few times on her screen.
"Are you taking notes? Because I've actually lost weight."
"It's not just about the weight, Sophie. As you lose weight your body gets puffy. You have to push past that, cut down on liquids too. My mom's a dietitian, you have to trust me on this."
Beautiful Ana with her fashion model physique. The girl all the boys fell over themselves to talk to. Older men gave her gifts and wanted to marry her. Stylish Ana. Perfect, bitchy Ana in her sleek black dress and perfect hair, who wouldn't want to be like that?
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