When Hunger Strikes

I did it again.

I had promised myself that never, never again would I eat in such a voracious, gluttonous, disgusting way. And yet here I am, right back at the starting point.

Here I am, wiping my mouth clean from the still warm droplets, rubbing the back of my hand against my semi-parted lips. Staring blankly at my image, reflected on the tinted glass of the cupboards looming over the kitchen counter. Hating myself for all I have just eaten and promising myself that this will be the last time. Actually, I am not promising that to myself, but rather to my reflection who is mouthing my very words back to me, voicelessly, as if mocking me.

Every time, I compulsively think that one day it is actually going to talk to me. It is going to answer me like it wanted to do all along, waiting to be heard. But the girl I see reflected on the glass panes, with her puffy eyes and swollen lips, her hair tied back just above the back of her neck, isn’t going to speak soft words of encouragement. Rather, she is going to yell at me and insult me for all the things I force her to do as well; then she will laugh, a coarse, insane laugh, at my expenses.

But as long as she stays mute, I try to convince myself not to waste my energies on such silly thoughts. Not when I have something much more real, and much more frightening and monstruous, to think about.

I know I will break my own empty promise. It is only a matter of time.

My eyelids are swollen. I think I must have started to cry at some point. It was probably when I realised I was not having a meal anymore, but rather a shameless binging episode.

The change is always so sudden. So violent and unrestrainable. A metamorphosis in the blink of an eye, a transposition into a different reality where everything around me has its own identical, flipped copy, except for me.

Before I realise it, before I can so much as attempt to gain back control, I find myself through the looking-glass. The world gets just a little bit darker, the light of the chandelier a bit dimmer, casting a different hue over the cream-coloured marble surfaces of the kitchen. The china plate, bordered by vermilion-red capillaries, looks as if washed over by a layer of juicy paint that makes the food look brighter, more enticing, irresistible. The air in the room is dripping with the aroma of the dish in front of me, the hot smell condenses before my eyes.

Before I can stop myself, I take a bite of the transformed meal. And everything crumbles.

Food is not food anymore: spoils of war lay before me, a trophy to the winner, the strongest, the fittest, the one that was able to prevail. That new first bite become a drug I am immediately addicted to, and there is no restraining myself.

I eat voraciously, I de-v-our, almost without stopping for air. I eat with my hands, because there is no other way to eat this food. I push one bite after the other down my throat, as if my own hand did not belong to me but to a stranger trying to feed me at an impossible pace. I eat quickly, filling the space between my cheeks, and I never become unable to taste what I’m eating.

Sometimes I find myself gasping for air -I feel like I’m choking, and I think this is it. There is an end to it after all. I picture a lump getting stuck in my throat, I see it in my mind as it squeezes past the walls of the pharynx up to the very limit of its elastic qualities, only to lodge itself behind the ring of the thyroid cartilage. I think again, here it is, I knew this would be the death of me, some way or another.

I hear a wheeze be born in between my lips. I scratch the skin of my neck and collarbones as if I could manually dislodge the lump, but at the same time I order myself to keep my cool, to have some self-composure, as if I were a preceptor trying to instil discipline in an unruly child. It is ironic, it is absurd, but it works. Like a competitive eater preparing for a national contest, I emerge from the state of shear panic, which really only lasted a few seconds but felt like hours, and diligently, I go on.

I check my reflection: this time it’s the one trapped in the marble surface of the countertop, as it is closer to me than the one living in the cupboards. I check she’s doing alright, that she is able to keep up with the original model.

Without missing a beat, and using the one hand I still own, the one that didn’t try and choke me with food, I brush a strand of hair off my eyes, I wipe the corner of my mouth. I focus on the feeling of my lips against the skin of my fingertips, as if I could taste what my mouth is tasting via the soft skin just around the bend of the nail: of course, they’re lucent and slippery and it’s all sugar and spice.

I finally reach a plateau. Food has filled me to my limit. I can feel my stomach stretch, the skin over it tensing below my shirt, rubbing against its cold fabric, the waistband of my trousers pressing its print into the flesh over my hips.

The meal ends when I cannot look at myself anymore, quite literally. I break eye contact with the multitude of my reflections on every damn surface of this shimmering, wiped-down kitchen, and I push the fine china away from me. It’s like a competition with myself, where the first to look away loses, so I can choose whether to focus on the fact that I always win, or that I always lose. It is all about perspective.

This kind of competition allows me to give up without ever bearing the burden of humiliation that comes with defeat. As soon as I lift my gaze again, I find another reflecting surface, reflecting the face of a winner.

And in a heartbeat, I am flung back into my own mind, as if in the past, where I came from; where food is just food and my lack of self-control is a non-resurfacing issue in my life. Here, I make sure to never show how little control I have over things.

Back on the right side of the looking glass, there is still one more thing I have to deal with. Because no matter how many realms I may cross, there is always just one me, out and about making troubles and then paying the consequences. But I usually find it is this that gives a certain sacrality to the ritual.

I make my way toward the bathroom, not the one I normally use, but a smaller one, where I store infinite stacks of my favourite cleaning products.

I kneel, as if ready to give thanks for what I have already eaten, for how the food nourished me and sustained me, for what little time it was part of me -about twenty minutes. The contact with the cold tiles makes me think of ancient trees burying their roots into the dark earth: it’s solid, it’s real, it is reliable. I will never lay a carpet over this floor, I want as little material as possible between it and the bones in my knees; I want to feel them screech with every retching motion, as I lean forward over my forearms, resting my forehand in the palm of a cupped hand, losing balance even, because it’s damn hard to keep it when bending your head over the toilet for five minutes and your quads are on fire.

People think that purging after a binge -inducing an emetic reflex – represents some sort of purification, or even a punishment; a way to cleanse oneself from and refute the feeling of being dirty and full.

But they’re wrong.

It is the very act of devouring a meal that constitutes the catharsis. That is the real moment of freedom, when one lets the river banks break and the water run wild and unrestrained, surrendering oneself to it. All that comes after, the purging, the crying, the sense of shame and disgust for what I have just done, is nothing but a trace of society’s shared worldview, a result of a lifetime under the influence of the very convenient one should and one should not. This is the origin of all feelings of inadequacy, of denial, of discomfort with oneself. This is where the mind splits, desperately trying to renegade a part of its own self.

I’m afraid I might be sending an incorrect message – the sense of guilt is real; but it is misdirected. I realised it some time ago and I am trying to work on that. Working so it does never happen again.

I want to be able to preserve what I feed my body, to let it become a part of my own matter. I want to look at each single bit and bite as a winning, a conquered treasure, the full subjugation of my pointless idiosyncrasies. And last but not least, I really do hate wasting.

They have been talking about me on the news, lately. Of course, nobody has any idea who I am or might be, hell no, they don’t even suspect I am a woman. It is such a violent, heinous act, killing and butchering, that they never even think of something other than a man, when they do find the corpses.

People -common people and even the police- imagine it takes the strength of an unhinged animal to do this deed and their mind naturally refuses to believe that such a thing could be entwined in the constitution of a woman. They are right, up to a certain point. It takes an incredible, amazing physical effort to cut up a body, complemented by the neurotic tremor of exhausted muscles, the stinging smell of industrial-size cleaning detergents.

They have started to show up all around town and they always match the DNA of some guy who went missing a little while back. These men are gone for good, that’s irrefutable.

Naturally I make sure to never leave behind any trace of my luxurious appetite. I am no fool: I always cut them up while still in my plastic all, hair net and face mask to catch even the tiniest piece of hair, eyelash, tear, or drop of sweat.

I just wish I were not so hungry. It is getting more and more risky to go out at night: crime rates continue to raise up and young men with their winter coats and condensed breaths are scared to go out, suddenly thrusted in the unfamiliar role of prey. A meal so inviting to make you lose your mind, more like a guttural growl than a mermaid’s chant.

It is going to be the end of me, or at least it puts me at risk, to have such unrestrainable hunger. Like history tells us, the moment in which circumstances seem favourable is when one ought to be ever so careful, to be on the lookout, lest one risks starting a chain reaction that might lead to a hazardous, fatal move.

Therefore I must be reasonable, I must ratio what I forage for myself, so that I am not pushed to hunt so frequently. I must conquer my hunger before it conquers me and consumes me as a tribute.

I realise now I have made but one mistake: I spoke of corpses, when I really should have said ‘’remains’’.

After all, I really do hate wasting.