Fabricated Deities

Tw: allusive depiction of bulimia and graphic portrayal of Pica, specifically amylophagia.

1. Fabricated deities 

There was raspberry polish on your middle fingers smudged on the edges of your skin. The rest of your fingernails were painted black. The glossy finish reflected through the light and made it look like you added specks of glitter for festivities; I couldn’t tell from the distance. I looked down to my own grown, naked nails sprinkled with tiny indents. I wondered if sickness ran through me and if you had the same calcium-deprived flakes growing beneath your nail beds. 

“Socrates asked what impiety is. He wanted to know the essence of what it meant to be holy…” our teacher's voice rang through the classroom, the mic pitching at the shift of her octave. 

You raised your hand, and she smiled. She had a soft spot for you and your active participation. I was sure it would reflect well on your grades.

“Just a minute, David,” she chastised with a gentleness.

The essence of you, I realized that day, was the eagerness to speak; the words couldn’t contain themselves in you, they sprouted out in infinite lexicons that strained my head, yet the slight pitch in your voice when you finished speaking was evident of your satisfaction. I went home that night, enthralled with the seduction of paganism as I never believed in gods, but as I heard you speak, I thought I ought to make up my own. 

1. Pedestal 

They have all gathered around you.

The class was divided into two. Those who were for the condemnation of an old white man who dribbled on and on to the double ignorant on the streets. I was never a fan of the ancient philosophers, most were bigoted, and their epistemology was reserved for white elitists who stuck up their noses at peasants. 

The class instantly formed a circle around you once assigned to our groups. There was no need for you to move. They all hailed at your feet. 

That day, as I stood with the ones who exhaled you as I did, I noticed your backpack, hanging behind your chair, had roses patterned on it. Painted ones, a print, of course, but the vibrant colors sought out attention. 

A boy beside me suggested an idea for the debate, a supporting argument for Socrates's condemnation. Once done, you pointed to him, a glint in your pupils swallowed by a dark chestnut. 

“That’s a good argument” you said with confidence. “Ian, right?” 

The boy nodded. 

“Nailed it!” 

Everyone laughed. A tightness emerged in me, a familiar one that had been locked away for years—the sudden itch of affection, a surprising feeling of longing. I joined the rest with my own laugh, a jubilant noise full of admiration. 

1. Common ground

Your long black hair was down to your shoulders. Strands of white were sprinkled throughout it, a humbling feature. A revelation as refined as Aristotle's definition of god, a harbor of wisdom. 

“What’s funny about the Mandela effect is that it all started because we weren’t sure if this man died or not,” you began, voice commanding the small huddle of the four of us.

We lingered, hanging on your words as we waited for you to finish. There was Julia, a white girl with a mop of brown hair on her head. She laughed at all your jokes, less genuinely, but more for appeasement purposes, and ka shaw tai, who kept his hair long and grieved the losses from residential schools. 

“A universal gaslighting,” I mumbled, but you heard. 

“Exactly.” You laughed. The sound was a stream of noise, flowing lightly through the air with breathiness. 

1.  False confidence 

There was a suggestion I had for the debate, and before I could contemplate the intent of my words, they spilled out. A foolhardy attempt at getting your attention. 

I held a cup of tea as I spoke, taking small sips between my words, letting my tongue soak up the caffeine, a bit of false liquid luck to forward my voice. 

It’s not a suggestion you’re happy with, and blood rushes to my cheeks. I don’t remember the words you said. The shame tingled my skin and reared me deaf to your criticism. When a girl next to me had a better argument, you nodded along like her words were a good tune. When she finished, you asked for her name.

I excused myself and headed to the bathroom. Once in the stall, I pulled a lengthy strip of toilet paper and let it dissolve in my tongue. The empty, white taste cleansed my mouth of orange pekoe. I sat on the toilet, gorging myself on bleached wood until the tremble in my hands went away.

1. Identity  

“What’s your name?” Julia asked as I turned to leave. Class was over, and once again, we had huddled as a pack outside the classroom, talking about the nonsensical. That day, I found out your parents were Korean. There was resentment when Julia asked, “where are you from?”. A common doubt when your skin didn’t match the ones of colonizers.

“I was born here,” you said. There was a dip in the corner of your mouth that Julia didn’t notice as she nodded along with an easy smile.

I told her, and she repeated the wrong name, replacing the B with a D. You corrected her, demonstrating a D with your fingers. Your consideration was outstanding to me, so much so that I memorized its doctrine as an ethic: engraved it with your moral principles. My longing ran wild, and so did my desperation. 

1. departure

“I should get to work,” I said.  

“Yeah, go to work,” you said. You gave me a quick nudge on the shoulder, and I looked over to Julia and pretended I didn’t notice. 

“I’ll probably go home. My partner is making grilled cheese!” you said. I watched you from the corner of my eye as you pulled out a pink umbrella from your backpack. You continued to say more, but there was pitching in my ear, and I began to walk away with a measly wave goodbye.

Outside, a storm took a breath, the rain stopping for an hour or so, clouds still dark and heavy with thought, a sob about to emerge. My mouth began to water as I walked away from you, the bland want of paper itching at my throat.

1. Crossed stars

You didn’t like my views on communism and China.

“Communism can’t exist in isolation. It’s not true communism. It can only exist if the whole world also participates in socialism/communism.”

There was a set frown on your face as you looked at me with mournful regret.

Earlier, we had been in agreement; Japan’s imperialistic past was vile. You had brought your fist close to mine until our skin touched mine for a brief second. The moment was sparse and quick; it hardly registered in my mind. 

“That may be true, but China has done some atrocious things–”

“Most of what you hear is simple propaganda like North Korea.”

“What about North Korea?” Your voice rose; there was a slight shift in tone, but I noticed. 

“You can’t truly believe everything you hear about them; it’s America trying to taint our image about them because they’re a threat…”

You looked down at your phone in your hands, the action revealing far more than I liked. Ian jumped into the conversation to my defense, but you had ceased to listen, eyes glued to your screen. 

1. Sugar rush

I saw you the next day. I walked out of class, and there you were, in your blue jacket, harsh against the pale pearl lighting of the common hall. Your hair was tied back and you glanced up from the conversation you were having with some guy beside you and noticed me too. 

“What class did you just have?” you asked, turning away from the guy you were speaking with. 

“Peace studies,” I said. My mouth felt dry. “I was just talking to Ka shaw tai a minute ago.”

“Oh yeah!” You smiled wide, fang revealing through your lips. 

“What do you have?”

“Gender studies.” You fiddled with the zipper on your jacket. 

“That sounds like fun!” 

“Oh, it is,” you assured me. The guy beside you tapped his foot, but your eyes still laid on mine. 

“I’ll think about taking it next year.”

“You should,” you said.

“Alright, well, I’ll see you on….”

“Monday…”

“Yes, no, wait, Wednesday,” I corrected you. 

“I’m sorry, I just gaslit you.”

“Not you trying to pull a Mandela on me.”

Your laugh came too easily, and I grinned widely. 

“Anyways, I’ll see you on Wednesday.”

“See you later,” and you left with my name on your lips, turning away as you said it, but it rang through me like sugar hitting the belly, preparing my body for a rush. 

1. Lower pleasures

“I love sugar,” I said once. I had invited you to come eat with me at the fancier campus cafeteria, where the salads were freshly stirred with dressing, and the burgers weren’t frozen in the middle. 

I had picked up a tub of sour gummy worms, already giddy with the clenching sting they would bring to my teeth. 

“Noted,” you said. You reached over and opened a freezer filled with sweet frozen victuals: ice cream and expensive popsicles. 

“It’s negative five outside,” I said as you pulled out a tiny container of gelato, Madagascar vanilla.  

“You have your lower pleasures, and I have mine,” you countered.

“John mills,” I said instantly.

“Ya-ha!” You snapped your fingers a little too loudly, and the woman behind you glared at your outburst for a minute.

You ate your ice cream fast, hardly stopping between bites, then excused yourself to the washroom. You were gone for 10 minutes, and I worried you might have gotten lost.  When you came back, your hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and your eyes were a bloodshot red. The nail polish on your index finger chipped more than usual. 

“You good?” I asked, taking a bite of my caesar salad. 

“Yeah…” you said with a hoarse voice. 

You watched me eat my meal, your fingers shaking as you drank from your water bottle.

“Want some?” I offered.

“I just ate—“

“That wasn’t a—“

“Plus, I had a big breakfast.”

You lied, of course. You had made a big show that morning on how you woke up late and had to bike ten times your usual rate to get to campus on time. The prospect of a lie lay between us like a dead fish, the smell of it wreaking through the rest of our conversation. I thought it was such a shame, the need to taint our friendship with lies was inevitable but it all seemed premature nevertheless. 

1. Assumption

My delusions started to shatter after I saw how much you had in common with her. I noticed you went quiet when I mentioned things you didn’t like and found myself unable to make up for the silence, my mind rushing with questions I didn’t have the right to ask. 

“I thought we were the same age,” you said dully. We played a guessing game, trying to figure out each other’s ages. You got mine right, and I got yours wrong.  

“No,” I paused to make up for the revelation that came rushing over me, “you seem older.”

“I know,” you solemnly said as if there was a bitterness to your youth. We were at different stages in our lives.  

I never asked why you saw youth within my eyes, and you never asked why I saw wisdom in yours, but somehow we both took offense to the other’s assumptions.

1. Held gaze

Over time, I noticed how long and thin your legs were.

There was a day you wore jeans instead of sweatpants, and I blinked twice as I noticed your stick-like limbs. I wondered how they carried your frail upper body. 

Though we never discussed it, I noticed your eating habits and odd pattern that came with you and your food. You often drank lots of water and gorged on fatty foods before excusing yourself to the bathroom less than a few minutes after finishing the meal. Sometimes you didn’t eat at all, simply sipping your water bottle.

We often made eye contact after you returned from your long trip to the bathroom. There was something that we both understood through the held gaze. I feared what I knew, but your eyes held more than just secrets. They held promises too.

1. swine

I never told you about the paper, but somehow you knew. When it was the two of us, I often ate the muffin liners like it was a part of the muffing itself or nipped at sucker's sticks, nibbling at the paper until it unraveled itself in my mouth. You watched me once until I swallowed it whole. My cheeks stung, but there was a relieved look settled on your face, and your shoulders sagged almost instantly. My revelation I had shifted your thoughts of me, just as I did for you. I became swine to you that day. The ground was now leveled. Two pigs, who rolled in mud, indulged in lower pleasures.  

1. her

I met her in your shared home. You had invited Ian and me over for dinner after class. She was white, and her hair was bright red. There were cartoons and animation merchandise around the house, from Sonic the Hedgehog to The Nightmare Before Christmas, all things I recalled you liked and talked about with joy. She spoke about the same topics in an identical manner.

She made an excellent meal for all of us, yam mashed potatoes with pecans on top and vegan meatloaf made with Beyond Meat. Like me, she studied you when you ate like a mother watchful of a child. A resentment festered; I wasn’t the only one who knew your secret. Once the meal was done, you made a show of staying in your seat, but I saw your eyes linger on the bathroom door. As if to help rid of the temptation, I excused myself. When I sat up to leave for the bathroom, she kissed you and mumbled something in your ear. 

I sat on the toilet with my pants at my ankles, staring at the white roll in front of me. A dangled square sheet of toilet paper stared back at me. The craving was hard in the bottom of my stomach, and needed kneeling. The paper shouldn’t have looked appetizing, but the thought of melting a little piece on my tongue and the starchiness running down my throat brought saliva to my mouth, so I did it. It tasted how it should have tasted, an uneventful turn of events, but the hardness in my belly did, in fact, soften but not without a few more bits of the paper. It didn’t horrify me when I realized I had finished the rest of the roll, the brown cylinder left in its wake and my mouth stuffy with brittle pieces of paper floating by my gums. I knew you would notice.

1. Commonality 

The four of us were outside, saying our goodbyes after the wonderful meal. 

You and she talked, and I spoke with Ian. She paired Ian and me together like it made sense. And maybe in some perception we did. 

But when Ian asked me to walk with him to the bus stop, why did you turn to look at me? Your lips were still moving as you responded to her, but your eyes landed on mine, waiting. 

There was a moment when the orange leaves blew across the field, bringing with them a chilled gust of wind, and my knee shook from the cold. I pretended to notice a squirrel skittering up a tree, my mouth too salty for my liking, when I finally answered yes.

The emptiness in your eyes had shocked me, and it hurt the most when you turned back to her and pecked her on the cheek. I craved the cleansing taste of paper, needing something to console me. 

When we left, I turned back. I knew which window was the bathroom from outside your house. I counted to ten and waited.