Elegy of an Eating Disorder

When you return to university, to that house that sits on the hill, you resume the painful life you left behind in the spring.

Autumn always hurts. Each time you reach out to embrace it, it burns your fingers like a light bulb. Something about the way the sky infuses with ink earlier each day tires you.

Every morning, you try again. And again and again and again. You blend smoothies and slice oranges. You pack a perfect lunch. But even then, you consider leaving your cards and cash at home.

Time is putty in your practiced hands. It matters not that your day from dawn until midnight is trainingandstudyhallandclassanddiscussionandpracticeandhomework. You find the will, you find the way, to carve out the two hours it takes to binge. You carve it out even if it kills you, because breathing has become binging, and binging has become breathing, and you cannot stop. You cannot stop.

At night, the warm wind whistles through the screen door. Your sister sits ten feet from you, and she understands everything and nothing of the storm that surrounds you. She reaches across the chasm, but you push her away with glossy lies. You crawl into a bed full of broken glass. Sleep is the only time you can escape your own mind.

Every meal is a mountain.

You’re never sure if the days aren’t dreams, and the dreams aren’t nightmares. The violence and the disorder are impeccable. The horror is electrifying. The secrecy is so divine.

Your beautiful blue sky has turned a nauseating white wine. For friends and family, you paint the pearliest smiles. It takes every last fume within you to act unafflicted.

You drive crumbling gray highways, pulled from Rancho Palos Verdes to Long Beach to Northridge, listening to Freddie Mercury and George Michael, yearning to leave your cyclone in another city. It never, ever works.

In November, you fall violently ill. No one in the history of academia has been pushed this hard.

In class, you almost pass out under a screening of The Lord of the Rings. It’s been two days since food has touched your lips.

You curate a playlist of songs that keeps you stuck in the storm.

Nights on campus glitter, and your glasses glint in the cool darkness. Hometown feels so far you feel you may never go back.

Delirium fogs these warm winter days. Red rivulets run from your wrists. Something has cracked inside your soul and you cannot find the salve.

At Ralphs, you tear through the aisles at record speed. The cashier smiles good-naturedly and asks, “Where’s the fire?”

Each day mangles you anew. Your own stamina astonishes you.

One day after practice, you sit in the locker room with your head in your hands for half an hour. Your fingers squeeze into your scalp, but you cannot cool the cogs and gears that are melting in the immeasurable heat of your fevered skull. Right and wrong have reversed themselves, so you concede to the voice in your head, which is always right. Right?

When you talk on the phone with Mom and Dad, you do not ask how their day was. It does not occur to you to ask. It never occurs to you to ask.

You’ve become impatient and impulsive and impractical. Endlessly irritated. Simply irate.

Bruises under your eyes. Dozens of sleepless nights. Sobbing into your bath mat. Hearing voices in the walls. Waking up soaked in sweat.

But

no one

no

one

detects a thing.

Not one.

Single.

Thing.

***

One day, from your car, you call a counseling service, and you tell the person on the other end of empty space that your eating disorder is eating you from the inside out. Static, and a scheduled appointment. After the line goes dead, you whisper, “You cannot fix me. I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry.