Drinking Digits: based on my victory over anorexia
Ana wasn’t sure when people began to notice she was sick. Perhaps it was when they could see her ribcage prodding against the inside of her chest like an animal that desperately wanted out of its crate. Maybe it was that one time in gym class when she fainted in front of everybody because her head became too heavy for her bones to hold up. It was the first time anyone had ever asked her, “Are you okay?”
She didn’t look at food like the rest of them. Most of the kids at school would drink orange juice at lunch and eat whatever government-regulated crap the cafeteria was serving up that day. She didn’t drink orange juice or eat in bites like everyone else. Ana spent her lunches drinking digits and eating in numbers. 25 calories for a carrot, 87 for the ranch. Together they added up to a single cup of orange juice. Her teachers always told her how good she was at math.
All of the numbers she ate throughout the day would return to taunt her late into the night as she stood over the scale on her cold bathroom floor, evaluating the damage she had done to the animal that lived inside of her chest.
“94 pounds heavy,” Ana thought to herself, thinking back to the calories in the carrot and ranch cup she ate at lunch. She let out a sigh that could shake a person to their knees, “25 plus 87 equals 94,” she thought. “Tomorrow I’ll stick with 50 calories,” and she vomited into the sink.
She woke up to a lunch bag packed with worry by her sister. Adhering to the side of the bag was a little pink post-it note that read, “Please eat,” and Ana cried her whole way through lunch.
Her friends never understood how, or especially why, somebody like her could starve themselves. “She’s already so pretty,” they would say. If ever they were to look just a little bit past her baby blue eyes and ample lips, they might have been able to comprehend the travesty.
“She’s just doing it to get attention,” a classmate would occasionally proclaim amongst locker room whispers to another, but Ana knew very well that the boys were out chasing hips, not lines. She didn’t want the attention, she wanted the control. The number on the scale dropped lower and lower the less she ate. It was action and reaction, and it happened every time. It was dependable.
Ana was embarrassed of her life at home, utterly ashamed. Her dad was an angry alcoholic and her mom was nearly just as bad, suffering from bipolar depression. She never knew what would happen after she crossed that line in the Earth that buried her home away from the rest of the world. Yet, she knew exactly what would happen if she didn’t eat. The number that glared back at her empty eyes every night would eventually go down just like the liquor on her father’s lips, and that gave her something to focus on.
Throughout the months, she became thinner and thinner until one of her classmates became so scared of the bones below Ana’s neck that she sought out the school guidance counselor for help. They sent Ana away to a hospital in Michigan where she screamed and kicked and cried until a long, narrow tube was placed through her nose on Christmas day.
It took a few weeks for the hospital to deem her stable enough for release and let her out with extensive therapy lined up. Throughout the next year, she spent her time writing poetry in her room and filling her walls with the absence of color. She splashed her walls with thick lines of the darkest blacks and haunting greys that filled her life. Her mind whirled with thoughts as she stared at these four walls for many months straight. One day, Ana rose from her bed and impulsively ran to the store to buy more paint. She sped back to her room where she hastily dipped her dark-stained brush into the new can. With two careful strokes of her hand, a vibrant yellow bird came to life within the darkness of her walls and Ana fell to her knees and wept.
She realized that during all those months of avoiding food, the only thing she was eating was herself.
kaledo-art
yousharknotpass
vaporwave
pixelskylines