This is not turning into a disordered eating blog. I promise. January 10, 2008

This is something I wrote for myself, before I had the balls to publish my post about my sporadic bouts with not eating. Writing “fiction” helps me process things; I don’t know why I don’t do it more often.

She writes; doing something with her hands keeps her from picking at her nails.

Truth: keeps her from moving anything into her mouth.

A fiancé who doesn’t know means that there are Doritos on top of the fridge and cold pizza within it. They taunt her from the other side of the wall and she wants to eat them, to shut them up. And then vomit, to shut herself up.

Fuck you, cheesy gordita crunch. Fuck you, anyone who can go to Taco Bell and enjoy a meal and not give it a second thought. Fuck you, fiancé, for being one of those people.

It’s the hunger. It makes her mean. It makes her not want to be touched. It makes her scour the internet for information about whether or not she is killing her metabolism and thus will have to eat nothing forever.

She pictures her metabolism, grey and empty and parched. The fire has burned down to ash. It coughs, looks up at her with weary eyes. Pleading eyes.

“Please ma’am.” She hears Oliver Twist, British orphan, and laughs.

Thinking about how she got to this point is not original.

In short: girl goes to college; girl meets unlimited buffet at dining hall; girl gets fat; girl learns from other girls the tricks of the non-eating trade as college girls do, late at night, in darkened dorm rooms, with Guster on the stereo. Cue the rollercoaster.

It’s such a cliché, but one she is not fully ashamed of. An eating disorder, she thinks – as an image of Posh Spice flaunts itself in her mind – is decidedly more glamorous than, say, meth.

“You’re glamorizing an addiction,” the therapist that lives inside her head says. “Just like Hollywood glamorized smoking. Just a fresh coat of paint on a rotting wall.”

Rotting. That’s kind of how she feels, especially without the energy. Without the muscle tone. Without the zest that comes from being a fully fed adult.

“Just another few weeks,” she tells herself, like the heroin addict who wants “one last hit – a big one” before rehab.

Another few weeks and then what? And then I’ll eat like a normal human being? And then I will extend the olive branch to food and we will live in perfect harmony? She pictures herself skipping down the street, hand in hand with a Twinkie. Cowboy hat and all.

She’s in her own head a lot these days.

On the messageboards (and there are always messageboards), they say that drug addicts are the lucky ones. They don’t have to “redevelop” a relationship with drugs. They, technically, can survive without the subject of their addiction.

“We,” writes SexyRexy129, “do not get that choice.”

She eats exactly two dried cranberries and then immediately searches the internet for their calorie content.

And so it goes.