Suffragettes clamped their teeth inside gibbous skulls before the last right, refusal, reneged. Mother birds force up their food for their fledglings; I, at the cerebral age of eight, vowed to grow my hair down to my heels, to go to bed hungry like the girls in fantasy books with gilded pages, to die for a cause.
Regardless of the hunger strike's futility, we all have someone we need to feed.
This is such a small story, really; girl gets first library card, fingers its edges in the pale dark of a pink room. Girl writes a memoir at eleven, misspells her middle name on purpose, bites her lip til blood comes, grows obsessed with Saint Catherine of Sienna, nightmares probing an atelephobia, almost knowing the next place god's palm would press.
Fasting may be a sacrament, but the grave isn't any farther from God than the table. Anorexia is not righteous or even glamorous. My eating disorder wasn't even about food, or aligned with the professional's theories of requiring control. Just East of Eden, the penultimate offense was coming up empty; bread and wine intoned a thousand years of asymmetry.
Take, eat, and do this often, in remembrance of me.
My eating disorder was about shame, all Leviticus and lethargy, about waking between Numbers and Revelations, calling every name in the old testament. My eating disorder was about absence, all the room left over in the chair when I sat for someone I would never see.
It is far too simple to excavate sternums from the siroccos of the internet. Pro-anorexia, a movement of mostly thirteen year old girls turn artifacts into idols, as if the dead could teach them needlessness. Eating disorders are as ingrained in our culture as the American Dream; to indeed be divine. Female thinness in
I'm not sure what my recovery will be about really; there is no name for the opposite of shame, but I do know that while food can't kill me, (barring an anaphylactic allergy to something besides self) but this illness can. Anorexia nervosa alone has a higher mortality rate than many kinds of cancer; up to twenty-five percent of sufferers will pass away from direct effects of starvation and its associated complications, such as suicide, organ failure, and electrolyte imbalance. There is nothing so graceless as living on your knees, refusing a slice of sheet cake at your own sweet sixteen, mistaking the fact that at fourteen you still have not bled as a sign you that you are safe.
To desire is inalienable; to hunger is inevitable.
It is enough.
