by Paz O’Farrell
*CW: eating disorders
Every fact I have learned about food, since that little pyramid diagram from primary, has been against my will. Even the useful ones, like how one should order tomato juice on airplanes for maximum hydration. Now I can’t bear to ask for any other drink when they roll down the carts through the carpeted aisles, even though the whole time I watch them approach, slowly, like a menace, I’m thinking I’d kill for a 7UP.
Another liquid example is beer. A German exchange student I met one autumn night of my life, walking down the Quebecois streets, chose to spend that time telling me about how back home they call beer “liquid bread.” The next few hours I glared at a pitcher of IPA. At my thighs. At the machine that charged me 11 CAD, because everyone is charged individually in Canada. Not at him because he was happy. Liquid bread. I think about this every time my lips kiss the neck of a bottle or I hear a can crack like ice.
My ex-roommate (freshman year in California, got sent to the hospital that first weekend on account of tequila inexperience) told me avocados are healthy fats. Never mind the “healthy”—I can’t get over the fat part. I used to love putting them in my salads.
Me and my salads. The fucking salads. I am a Sisyphus of kale.
*
Here’s the best one: pineapples eat you back.
*
I know no one really wants to hear about it, but that’s never really been a deterrent in any regard of my life, has it?
*
These holidays I heard a phrase I hadn’t heard in a while: hacerse la flaca. It means to act like you are skinny, either by pretence or as flaunting. Both are dangerous. Weight has weight back home.
*
I have fruit every now and then. I delight in sugar, but I can’t have too much of it because it’ll make me freak out, so it’s not really delight. It’s like having sex with someone you know you shouldn’t, and you are left with all the bad parts as they keep snoring in the morning. Or like the ring of grime in a bathtub.
You know, I once had a birthday party where we all sat at a long table and decorated cupcakes. I still remember the purple sprinkles. This must have been eleven years ago. The day after Valentine’s day, a sweltering summer in Buenos Aires made tolerable by the icy pool (refrigerated by a formidable araucaria), the chlorine was drying in our hair—blonde girls turning green—and we dipped our fingers in whipped egg whites and sugar, dulce de leche, melted milk chocolate. I can guarantee I licked all my fingers, and this was all before the birthday cake.
*
The same girls, two years later, would have a different outlook on cupcakes. The first year of middle school, three classmates of mine had to miss the three-day trip to San Clemente del Tuyú because they had been diagnosed as anorexic. I wasn’t really sure how anorexia would prevent them from whale watching, yet I have to say I remember the sticks they had for legs under the tunics we had to wear. I’d watch them walking down the hallway and imagine them tripping and shattering. It was hard not to. I thought of it as fragility then. My views have changed too.
*
I think potatoes are okay. A dermatologist told me grains break you out. The ex-college roommate said the same about dairy. Everything is bad for something.
*
I know it’s not original to write about eating and its disorders. How it’s bourgeois, even. Hunger as a choice when the world is consuming itself. I’m not sure what defence there is, other than pain. A weak defence. I’d like a moat.
We know it’s not really about vanity. We know it’s not even about my body! We all know that, like most people, I hated myself and so I designed a daily mechanism to exercise cruelty—figurative flagellation, femininity and catholicism being important factors to consider in light of the virtue of restriction. My American friend who did ballet and is still under its grip tried to convince me that I was alimentally fucked up like her, and I told her: “If that’s true, everyone I know back home has an eating disorder.”
What worries me is this: Argentina is #2 in anorexia cases, internationally. Japan has us beat. I think it’s quite literally the opposite end of the world from where I’m writing this, although we are united by a fictional thread that crosses the Earth’s nucleus. #1. God help the Japanese.
*
Let me tell you about my collarbones. Let me tell you about feeling confident most items in the dressing room will look good on my little body. Let me tell you how people break their backs to help me out and buy me drinks. Let me tell you about getting my period about every 110 days and always worrying I’ve gotten fat when I do, and that no one else will ever get me a gin tonic or lift up my suitcase up a step or smile at me in the street or want to hold my hand, quietly, at night, just to feel me.
*
I know a man who got an operation where they cut off half his intestine, or they shrunk his stomach the way grapes get shrivelled. I’m not sure. Something violent and clinical and cosmetic. He did lose weight, but, apparently, every three months he has to pass a stone. My uncle just went on a fishing trip with him and they had to drive him to the hospital two nights in a row.
*
Have you heard about the K-pop idol diet? An apple for glucose, a protein bar for self-explanatory reasons, a potato. Why the fuck do I hold myself to the standard of a Korean pop star, you may wonder, as I do sometimes. And then sometimes I find a lot of comfort in the idea that I am a normal person, allowed to have some garlic butter. Or, obscenely, a slice of carrot cake, with icing, and the world does not swallow me whole.
Since I left Argentina to go north and then even further north, I would throw in a line or two about my weight to my psychologist. Like a report, like a bone, before we moved on to my actual problems, which I had several of (not in the scope of this edible clusterfuck). We didn’t video-call, so it’s not like she saw my flesh and bones and had any grounds to be worried or suspicious. Pick a reason: I didn’t want to magnify it, it wasn’t a big deal, I didn’t want anyone to stop me.
I really liked making myself skinny; it was something I could do as opposed to the aforementioned Actual Problems.
Until I didn’t and some months it felt excruciating because I had to eat and have a body every single day. I was tired. I am tired. To my bones, visible and near. When my psychologist saw me in person for the first time in years, that was that.
*
Not my mom, though. She didn’t congratulate me explicitly but you should hear the way she glows with pride when she says “this is my daughter” these days. She didn’t sound like that when I was fifteen and fat, I will tell you that. Seven years ago, the best way to get me to smile was an Oreo McFlurry.
*
Someone explained to me what their keto cousin ate and I had a moment of recognition, except I knew what I had and it sounded like the cousin didn’t. If it isn’t a disguised disorder, what is it with keto? Moral superiority? Masochism?
I used to tell people bread was my favourite food when I was younger. Any kind. I didn’t even put butter on it. Bread and circus, all I needed. I read a poem about bread being inevitable and I think about it like a prayer, as forgiveness, a caloric mantra.
*
Did you know that apparently my mother forbade my sisters from commenting on my weight? I think about that a lot. The sick sense of validation I predicted I’d get from her when my ribs started showing like the arches of the neighbourhood church. Being proven right. Then again, sometimes she frowns at the way a shirt hangs on me, or if I turn down ice cream.
I’ve never understood the woman.
*
I’ve lived with someone who has a similar story. It’s hers to tell. She saw it in me.
Cooking for her was one of my favourite things to do. I spent an inflatable-mattress summer in San Francisco doing nothing but planning our meals, scouting recipes, going to the Safeway across the street daily. Bitching when she bitched that I got gluten free flour. Going to the treadmill most mornings.
She told me, you know, I never want to say anything about your weight (I knew where this was going), but you’re really very skinny. You could use a hamburger.
I spouted some lie about endorphins.
I did not feel really very skinny. I felt monstrous. Vile. I don’t think I saw my reflection that entire summer.
She said: it’s not on your body, it’s in your head. She tapped her temple twice.
That helped. But then she too will call me and tell me about gaining weight, mainly in her stomach but not her limbs, so that she feels like a spider. This is objectively funny. I just wish she could hold a mirror to the kind and wise things she tells me about the bullshit we share.
*
The respect I have for people who don’t worry about any of this. For not applying these ridiculous standards to their body, for living outside of the mental chokehold. It rivals the respect I have for anyone thinner than I am. Our intimate acquaintance with the pain of restriction, like an invisible mutual friend in the room.
*
At some point I looked at the kind strangers around me and I realized: These people are congratulating me on being thin.
Then I realized further: It’s the discipline. My work ethic.
Lastly I realized that if my body is mine and not theirs, then I can look however I want. I can be ugly! I can have acne! I can have a bad haircut! I can even have meat and fat on my bones! And I’m trying to congratulate myself for knowing that, except, you know, everything you’ve read.
*
I haven’t read Delphine de Vigan so if she writes about any of this I’m sorry, it’s not on purpose.
*
Last week I wrote the worst essay of my life on Samuel Beckett and self consumption. Tomorrow I will watch the Timothée Chalamet cannibal movie. For years, one of my favourite stories to tell has been about the Chilean plane crash survivors, who report that human meat tastes like chicken.
I am twenty-two and I am eating myself alive, like my loved ones before me.
*
The anorexic ex-ballerina who now does pole, a bulimic former high school athlete, and I walk into a Korean barbecue joint. It’s the start of a joke and its punchline too.
*
At the beach, I pulled out the saltines and offered them to said people. The bulimic said my diet was saltines and gum and I said that’s all you need to live. Are you okay, said the anorexic. A question I had gotten used to after shaving my head the week before. My hip bones were filed and I wore them like accessories. I laughed as a response.
*
I clock anyone skinnier than me. It’s an odd mix of fear and resentment and kinship. One April day I skimmed and scanned the entire populace at Disneyland with satisfaction, given I was the skinniest person at the rat amusement park. Until 5 PM, on the way out. A girl with toothpick legs. She was far younger than me and in a wheelchair. She looked like she was on her Make a Wish foundation trip or something. I don’t know what the fuck was wrong with me, being jealous of that unhealthiness. I wanted to apologize to her. I still do.
*
I remember which part of my tongue to send teriyaki sauce to, which glands thrive with ginger, the sector that blooms with the sweetness of peaches. One of these days I will have chocolate.
Paz O’Farrell is a writer from Buenos Aires pursuing a Creative Writing Master’s at Concordia. Her work has been published in the Scripps Journal and In Media Res, selected as a finalist for the DISQUIET non-fiction prize and the Adroit Prose Prize. She has received the Hollfelder Award.
headlight anthology 