The Easy Way Out

Past the point of starvation, things begin to fly. Hunger, for so long a gaping emptiness, a rock in your chest, opens up and now floats a perfect bubbling inside you. Legs and arms, so weak and aching, are restored, light as air. You are the master of yourself, of your body and mind. Everything moves so slowly and yet so fast. The world passes in a blur of inconsequential images, sticking and moaning like a video with the tape stretched out, while behind eyes glazed and distant, the mind whines and screeches wonderfully clear and coherent. You can’t figure out how much change you were supposed to get for your bandages and diet pills any more, but you could tell how many calories in an apple, in a lettuce leaf, in a stick of celery. Some scales and a knife, you could measure it and cut it up until it makes a round number (how important a round number is); arrange it beautifully on a tiny plate; sit and watch it go brown, throw it away. This is what keeps you here - this feeling of being, of perfect control, is more than compensation for the pain.

Each day becomes planned out so perfectly, every hour twisted around what to eat and not eat. Black coffee, walking to school, diet Pepsi and hide somewhere away from the smell of the canteens. Home delayed as long as possible, the temptations of cupboards filled with cereal, crisps, bread and honey. So stay at school, sleep or work with headphones in. Remind yourself always that however hard it is, however much it hurts, it’s worth it. Music so loud it makes your ears ring, block out the hunger, the thoughts of food spinning and churning endlessly. Home later, six maybe seven, eat some protein if you need it, or some soup if you don’t, salad leaves in vinegar. More pills. A diet pill, caffeine keeps you awake so a sleeping pill and an aspirin to ease the muscles demanding attention with their ache and cry. Sleep if you can, you know less than 8 hours sleep increases appetite by 10? But then if you’re awake you’re burning calories. Sit in the dark online, look up diet tips and disregard them, play Courage through headphones so no one can hear. Sit up straight, another 10 calories burned. Lay down in the carpet and do sit ups and leg lifts until 4am. Sleep, eventually. Wake, early.

Running in the park is disturbing in winter. The hunger makes you paranoid and anxious; there is always someone behind you or a car pulling over a little too close. They could get you in from behind and drive you away, pull you into the pushes and twist knives into your precious heart. A heart pattering so loud and so fast it’s hardly even your own. You run anyway, because not to run is just as bad, the anxiety just as cutting and agonising. While winter is frightening, summer is no better. Long sleeves are essential, covering the misery that even a smile and a chattering conversation can’t hide. Big jumpers to hide the fat still clinging to your skin are too big and heavy for the heat, there is no choice but to stay locked in your room, bare and lonely. More sit ups and blaring music. You never talk to anyone you know any more, only type loving messages to starving girls you know only by screen name, press your sympathy into cyber-hugs and cyber-understanding. It is not enough.

And then the hunger gets too much. Before you know it you’re downstairs and there’s a bagel in your hands, you eat it ravenously and ridiculously, simultaneously stuffing bread into the toaster and pouring cereal haphazardly into a bowl with full-fat milk. You eat constantly, one thing after another. Carbohydrates grate your insides, your stomach stretches and bloats. In the mirror upstairs you see there is chocolate smeared on your face and your stomach is distended to pregnant proportions. There are no tears yet, not until later when you are curled in bed in agony, the food an impossible weight, the pain stabbing. The toilet-bowl is suddenly so beautiful that that makes you cry, a release so perfect and disgusting you know you’re unwell. Starvation is so passive, so controlled; it is the construct of sanity with nowhere to escape. But this, this is broken and streaming, something has left you that never should have gone. You feel its loss, treasure it and miss it deeply; it is the loss of denial. To diet is normal, everybody diets, but this is sickness. This is excess and insanity. It grips you as you wash your mouth with bicarbonate of soda (to save your enamel, as if it really matters anymore) and mouthwash (to save your parents the smell of the vomit still burning your throat).

When you wake, still hurting, the loss is a memory. You ‘start over’, again, promising another week of fasting for the sin you committed. When you break that, sobbing over left over greasy take-out food, you promise again. Cycling always, writing every number in a book so you don’t forget (because to forget is so easy now). You watch the number (the only one that’s really important) spiral downwards and dive upwards until you forget what it really means. It means nothing. It is just a number, so important and yet so arbitrary. You know, on some hidden level, in some deep ache that you are dying, but somehow you don’t care about that. That is long-term, and the long-term is too terrifying that you remain stricken within the hour, the minute, the moment. It is easier this way. Hard to believe, this is the easy way out.