Don’t Torch The Skin You Live In
After a lifetime of battling my body, I’m waving the white flag
TW: Disordered eating, eating disorders.
My first memory of food is my mother trying to pry the tines of a fork into my mouth. Her pleas were quiet and urgent, and it was a rare thing to see my mother cry. She was impenetrable, violent, and beautiful. Tears are the dominion of children, but it was as if I were birthed bone-dry — capable of sorrow, but unable to weep for it. That morning, before he woke before he would part the beaded curtain that separated their bedroom from where I slept before I would enter that room when my mother wasn’t in it before he would break me, break things, I remember staring at my mother as she tried to work food in me and feeling nothing.
I am five.
Back then, my mother was bone-thin. Body taut from waiting tables, charming customers, counting tips. Smoking through a pack of Kent 100s, fishing through it, finding a smoke, lighting another. This was before the cocaine and peach pies rotting under the bed. She was a woman who moved and I liked the look of her. The way she was thin, yet far from frail, and the possibility of her edging out of the frame.
And I wanted my magic tricks, wanted to disappear. Not to part the beaded curtain, not to remember how…
