Twelve Days

Author's Note: This story contains sensitive topics including mental illness, eating disorders, and depression.

i.              On the first day of Anorexia, my true love sent to me a scale at the age of thirteen.

My one and only love, my darling, the very contagion that burgeons within me: she rules my soul scale like no other. The gift of a scale started an internal infernal battle within my youthful being, whereby the numbers align every other blue moon, a red thread of measurement wrapping around my very essence, skin straining till taut and marred in rosy scars. Metamorphosizing into the embodiment of flawlessness becomes a distant dream till bones protrude, skin blanches, and limbs become devoted disciples.

I run miles all the while till I’ve gypsum bile, sheathing my throat with a very Nile, tainted by her tempting guile. The scale eases toward perfection just as I do but I’ve neither a flat stomach nor carved cheekbones as the body proves an untamable sea. She’s a naked cherubim, a throne bearer of the scale who bars the doors to Paradise, her flaming arrow having long ago pierced my heart and transformed my plain innocence into a raging frenzy, seeking marvelous beauty where there is none.  

We are not Achilles and Patroclus but rather I, her glorious son, and she Thetis, having bathed all my body in the River Styx apart from mine eyes and mind. She feeds me on rotted innards of sentences: “Only I can love you”, “I am your savior”, “We shall rule your scale soul together.”

Though she is my undoing, I love her, perhaps more than I do my own life. And I quite willingly become an empty shell of myself as I follow her to the ends of the Earth. O’ come, great willow thighs, a supple bosom, and a weight of whispered nothings! You are mine and mine alone.

ii.            On the second day of Anorexia, my true love sent to me two fertile groves.

How many pounds must I shed until I’ve got daffodil arms? Until I’ve lavender fingers? Until I’ve stringed hair that smells like burnt roses? Until I’ve a heart that blooms at every other beat? When will I be small enough? Thin enough? Perhaps I shall shrink in size until I’ve copied her own image: that of a willow tree, with a crackling hunchback for wear, frail foliage atop its head, and a taut neck of brittle bones that twists as does a dancer.

She sways in the wind, her forbidden fruit and all of her, her tantalizing arms grabbing hold of me to scream sacred whispers: “I can teach you good from evil: how to curl up in bed (AND RELISH THE STRAIN OF EVERY MUSCLE), push your finger down your throat (TILL YOU’VE CLEAN INSIDES), squat in the shower (AND LET YOUR BODY BURN), and conceal food in cupboards (TO HIDE YOUR SIZE FROM PRYING EYES).”A tree of knowledge she is and doomed to my death am I who takes that fateful bite of the apple.

iii.           On the third day of Anorexia, my true love sent to me three fateful friends.

Jealous she is, of the three Moirai, the divinities that decide my death. As Clotho, she would spin my fate into the thinnest golden thread, with even more precision than Lachesis measure my worth length at the dawn of each day, and, like Atropos, carve my fortune into the dip of each night.

She reeks of ichor but is no god. No, she feeds on the sacred blood of deities like a leech, craving that sweet ambrosia as a mosquito does blood. She is the harbinger of jaundice skin and sunken eyes, popping out of the face like lanterns at twilight, of baby-like lanugo and split ends, as frazzled as humid air, of fatigue and a dazzling dizziness, spreading throughout the body with the fiery heat of plague. And oh here come the locusts, my very bane, roving like a windward whirlwind of a wave!

iv.           On the fourth day of Anorexia, my true love sent to me four falling birds.

We fly like turtledoves, she, with wings like Daedalus that reach o’er the expanse of the very sky, and I, falling like Icarus, reaching for the glory within the light of day. She tells me that I can reach the sun, shining in all its incandescence, and yet I fall. I fall and fall time and time again, meeting my doom as she pecks at my gorged eyes, tart incarnadine liquor o’er her own hands. She says that love is a sacred pact to the death, one that makes me into a ray of gilded gold. Why then, my love, do I only become a molten sludge of wax and wings, plummeting like a damned shooting star into the depths of the sea?

With a thousand roads of words down her throat, she warns me not of the sun but of those who will want to steal me from her. She’s protective like that, protective of my body, of my mind, of my scale soul. She alone shall own me, for I am as free as a nightingale in a birdcage, one with clipped wings yet the urge to fly.

v.             On the fifth day of Anorexia, my true love sent to me five golden kings.

She gazes with a lecherous leer while upon a throne of avarice in weight of Midas gold. After my birth, she, the five kings and all of her, brought forth the gifts of gold, to weave a blanket o’er my body, a bag of bones, frankincense, to mask the putrid scent of my own vomit, and myrrh, to embalm my body at death.

She weaves emperor’s new clothes: loose pants that are baggy at the waist and shirts that make my chest into an indeterminate lump. Hugging my stepladder ribs, I walk prouder than ever in what I perceive as a lavish costume only to find that I’ve on the clothes of the living dead, that I’ve taken on skeleton accouterments fit for a queen indeed, a queen buried deep within her own cupidity. And all I search for is a golden ring, fit for a queen, a duke, a king, within a coat, enclosed, a wing, as broken as ice from a single spring!

vi.           On the sixth day of Anorexia, my true love sent to me six diseases playing.

I’ve a contagion inside me, one that brings about feverish skin and a frenzied mind, a heart that slows and quivering chills in kind. I’ve a ghostly pallor and eyes but am blind to the body’s vigor that grows weak with time. And the plague and I, we play in a ring (a rhyme), around the rosie (a vine), with pockets full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down (into the Rhine).

Her whispers are like the ghosts of some sickness, blooming as do flowers at the birth of May. She has fields of florae, all of her own design, and that spray the handler with a trace of hemlock upon a finger’s touch. And I’m covered in her very sap, sticky on the fingers and of the consistency of honey. Oh, she’s truly like honey, for I’m melting in her very essence, like ice in a glass of water, rejoining its mother once more. The sun’s shedding heat atop our heads, but she urges me to bundle up so that I don’t catch a pink-nosed cold - so that I sweat off every pound till I’m thin as a rail, thin as a spaghetti strand that breaks with but a crack. O’ a crack is all it takes, and I end with a swift pop, like a bulbous, pus-filled rosie that breaks into consumption.

vii.          On the seventh day of Anorexia, my true love sent to me seven dawns a-dimming

Dawn is the life of day and death of night, or so she tells me. I’m to mourn for the loss of darkness, the breadth of night hiding what cannot be seen with the naked eye. Under the revealing light of day do my frail limbs and all of me become part of a shrieking wraith, the feeble fright of sight being a residual plight. With the coming of light, I’m reborn an innocent maid, one who knows nothing of making love with a body of bones.

As night says its goodbyes, the final spread of stars makes pinprick holes in the sky, like incandescent open wounds bleeding silver. Dawn has many names; Solace is not one of them. Under daylight is her mask unveiled for all the world to see: bloodied scabs that won’t heal, brittle nails that chip like paint, and a shrunken chest, diminishing as a snail does into its shell. She’s nocturnal: she takes pleasure in the night and sleeps during the day. I, however, am neither asleep nor awake for she follows me into every dream, every breath. Only when dawn dims does her power grow tenfold as she takes full claim of the horizons like some great majestical being.

viii.        On the eighth day of Anorexia, my true love sent to me eight mothers milking

I’ve carrots and salt for a meal and blueberries as sweet as any flower’s nectar for dessert, and with that, I have a feast. The smells of such rich delicacies do not quench hunger but rather sustain it. She calls it a fool’s venture to wish for unending satiety but a maestro's endeavor to master the art of hunger. And so I suckle hunger as a baby does its mother, intuitively and without defiance. One’s craving for nourishment becomes a fickle thing to control, however. The temptation of mother’s milk proves all too hard to resist. A slice of bread or two and she’s all the rage. It requires only her deceitful whispers to soothe one’s cravings once again, whispers of what could be rather than what is. And oh what a temptress! She has the words of fool’s gold, turning liquid in your own mouth but into glorious ore in hers.

She insists there is no denying that spread o’er a thin strand of time, hunger does not become so unbearable; once one is always hungry does fullness become a luxury, something unfamiliar and that one ceases to expect. Hunger becomes a friend and I, its master, for I know not life without it. What is life but a pain in the stomach, acid eating at its own walls? 

ix.            On the ninth day of Anorexia, my true love sent to me nine daisies dancing

She hugs me to see if my bones have shrunk at night - if I’ve a piano-keyed ribcage. We slow dance into the evening, like frail daisies under twilight air, and I wonder if it’s only to press her chest against mine, to flaunt her meager tell-tale heart, to mark myself with a promise of what I long to become: smaller.

And we dance like those gentle chrysanthemums, flickering willow o’ the wisps in the wind, faint fluorescent lanterns that light the way o’er murky bogs. A rose by any other name would indeed smell as sweet, but no - I smell of rot, of an aching throat torn into the softest shreds of skin. I’ve fingers that are raw at the knuckles, kaleidoscope bruises tender at the touch, and a stomach that eats its own insides, acid bubbling like toil and trouble. To the flower of new beginnings, an ending smells of a sacred summer day, one of burning heat and raining fire, and crackling leaves at the outskirts of the hearth. I’m cold even in the absence of wind but her heat keeps me warm, her touch like tickling tendrils of hair. Oh piece by piece, like a dandelion whisked by the wind, I fall apart into her very hands.

x.             On the tenth day of Anorexia, my true love sent to me ten wards a-keening

She’s quieter here, somewhat subdued. It’s like she’s waiting, watching. The boy down the hall gets booty juiced for talking back and a girl’s screaming because she wants to take my book. She calls the nurses wretches. Perhaps it’s because here she’s writhing, dying. She doesn’t like the way they narrow their eyes at our plate, at that untouched brownie and cold mac and cheese. The nurses are cold, sharp, and un-emotional. It distances them from us that way. But they aren’t tyrannical like the nurses from the ICU, the ones who won’t hesitate to force Boost down your throat, that give you twenty minutes to eat, or “It’s a supplement for you, dearie.” So, she has the nerve to giggle because they let us starve in here because we’re surviving off of a dream of a meal: animal crackers and granola bars. 

She’s not giggling now. No, they’ve pressed a stethoscope against our belly to listen for a leaden heart, so now she’s keening. O’ she’s crying so hard she can scarcely take another breath. She can feel the folds of fat, making great lumps even underneath loose clothing. Sometimes I wake up in the deep of the night to find her staring right back at me, searching my soul for an assurance of cleanliness. The one time I find her asleep, I creep out into the hall to flag down a nurse. I ask them to smother her in her sleep. The ward’s a scary place for us. I suppose it’s because we lose each other here.

xi.            On the eleventh day of Anorexia, my true love sent to me eleven vipers griping

She’s the snake of Eden. The doctors condemn her to a lifetime of crawling on her belly and eating dusty dreams of a person. She tricks me into disobedience of the body’s innate desires. We become like gods, eating from the tree of knowledge. And then we fall, in one fell swoop. Gone is Paradise. We protest our size ‘till it is all but inconceivable, ‘till we are but ram-rod straight, pointing to the pearly gates. Alas, I have covered myself for she can only see my nakedness, my body for everything it truly is: a great voluptuous mound.

What is she but temptation? It starts with a whisper, easing that burning hunger within me, and becomes a fully-fledged nudge toward the fall. My greatest transgression is that against my body though she doesn’t see it as such. No, rather it’s going against her will that proves the great disobedience. I know I cannot return to the ignorant bliss that was and remains Eden, but I can plow the Earth to fertility, till it’s ripe as fruit reminiscent of another time.

xii.          On the twelfth day of Anorexia, my true love sent to me twelve mourners humming

Oft in the haze of a nightmarish night, heart monitors and all, as she and death mingle with one another, I can assure you I’ve never seen anything so crimson as she. She’s bleeding and blushing with secrets: tales of hidden bags of lettuce stuffed down the garbage disposal, midnight cereal dust smeared across our fingertips, boiled tomatoes and microwaved carrots for a meager meal, and pitch-black coffee for days. She’s quite a twitching, gurgling thing when she’s unveiled for the world to see.

It started once I threw away the scale. She didn’t speak to me for a week and her whispers reverted to mere nagging. Sometimes I still wonder what she would have told me had I continued to let her rule my scale soul; perhaps she’d have become a pale apparition of sentences: “Please love me”, “Don’t leave me”, “I am everything to you”, “Who else will love you as I do?”

She dies in the honey-moth hospital, walls as pale as her countenance, chilled as her soul. Nurses here aren’t like those in the ward. No, they don’t play games with her. It’s a supplement or tubes down your nose, pumping fluids into your stomach without your consent, filling you up like a balloon just bursting with air. She dies as I breathe five times a minute. I realize how close she’s willing to drive me to death in the name of procuring some unattainable ideal: utter flawlessness. And that’s all it takes - resistance and she’s gone like a dandelion in the wind.

Her coffin was small and bare of any intricacies. She was never one for embellishments, only simplistic perfection. She asked for no ceremonies, but mourners came along anyway. Recovery and I - we all came humming, keening, mourning for the day I lost my means of control, my esteemed profession, my one true love. But when it comes down to it, I only have so many words left for her frail corpse, for the one who drove me to become a skeleton shell of myself, void of any and all energy or desire to live: “You may grapple my mind but you shan’t have my heart.”