There are moments - moments where your sense of normal lapses. Your days are a mad see-saw between binging and then exercising for six hours straight, and then the alternating days of nothing and exercising for six hours anyway.
Actually, after awhile you don't even know if your days actually alternate between the two anymore, or if it just feels like it.
Because, after that while is over, there is only famine. The hunger fills you up, emptiness gnawing at your edges. You blur, and fade.
Secret exercise is key. Sleep leaves my fat body rounded and lethargic in bed, a breathing mass taking up too much air.
Exercise is better than sleep, and puts insomnia to use.
People's compliments turn sour after a while, from 'you have porcelain doll skin.' to 'you look pale...sick.'.
There's a weird, polar-opposite opinion of pride and shame that you grow towards your sickness. Between 'Look at me! -I'M SICK!!!' to 'please...don't look at me, I'm s i c k....'.
In the morning, it's the one time of day I look myself in the mirror. Everytime I look, my reflection is foreign.
Greasy hair, eyes dark with yesterday's makeup. I smudge the makeup and apply more, rimming my eyes with kohl.
My skin goes numb more often and longer now. Yesterday, a needle had somehow entered under my skin and popped out through another place. I didn't notice until it was bleeding.
When I can feel my skin, I'm cold. Tea doesn't warm me the way it used to. It just heats my stomach, an uncomfortable reminder that the organ exists.
There are things people don't see. Or, pretend not to see.
The backs of a girl's kneeling knees in a bathroom stall after lunch.
A bonegirl's legs, marching her down endless aisles at the market; two lean, separate soldiers that stay close but never touch, her arms reach for things, check them, put them back.
The chubby daughter who hates/loves/wants/doesn't need food.
I couldn't eat all day.
Lots of trying....No doing.
In made a huge dinner for everyone, even a modified, safe version for myself.
3 egg whites and a cup of cauliflower.
That's all I expected of myself, just to eat it. Just to try.
But I couldn't even do that. I ate 1/4 cup of cauliflower (6.25), if even that.
I couldn't chew it. I chewed each piece 20 times like always, but it didn't seem like food. It seemed like I was chewing plastic, and I swallowed without tasting the tiny bites I took.
6 calories. What a failure.
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