Failiures

I tried, for a day, to be normal. I ate an avocado and tomato egg white omelet, a side salad, loaves of organic bread with jam and cheese, and a third or less of a raspberry tart out at lunch with my mother. I had not eaten in fifty hours. My mother was so happy to see me eat. The idea of my eating disorder no longer so revolts her that she denies my dramatics over it, she is genuinely terrified for me now. Ignorance or genuine terror, what is worse. What is worse not for me, but for her.

I felt good enough after eating to try on clothes at an Anthropologie. A large, my old standby, was baggy and disjointed on me. A medium bunched and swallowed my body. A small fit well. How could a small fit well? I don't feel small.

I dryswallowed fifteen ducolax pills. The girl I like across the hall asked me to go out to eat and party, and I went to the food court and ate four slices of greasy pizza and bags of chips and bags of gummi candy. And then I smeared on eyeliner and went to a party.

The music throbbed inside room like a heartbeat. The pulsating bass of top twenty hits swelled inside my belly. My belly couldn't take it, and I ran as fast as I could in my impractical, too tall cork wedges back to my dorm. And as I was overcome with cramps and slow shit and a firey hot pain through my intestines on top of everything, I started to cry. I wished so badly that I could be normal.

And then I went to get my scale.

I called my mother still in tears. My mother, once my worst enemy, so like me in all of the worst ways. When I'm with her only the bad things come to mind. Alone, lonely, I am so homesick for all of her good things. I sobbed muddled I-love-yous and I'm-sorrys and I-want-to-come-homes on the phone. I am such a fuck up, I told her. I can't do anything right. I ruin everything.

She told me it was impossible for her to unlove me. And those words are the only things keeping me.