Page 74 of Guy's Girl
I didn’t have just one more spoonful. One turned to two, which turned to four. It tasted so good, and it went down so easy, and the excuses started piling up in my head—but I’m hungry, but I didn’t eat much today, but I was anorexic for so long, but I deserve this peanut butter, I deserve to eat half a jar, maybe more, just a quarter jar more, that’s not so bad, is it, and maybe just another spoonful, it’s so good isn’t it, and, shoot, is that the bottom of the jar, how did I get here, holy shit, I just ate an entire jar of peanut butter, that’s, like, three thousand calories, I just put three thousand calories into my body without even blinking, holy shit, holy shit, oh fuck, what did I just do to myself, oh my god, oh my god...
The panic descended like a familiar pair of arms, a hug that starts tender but grips tighter and tighter, constricting my chest and cutting off my windpipe.
Fuck.
Fuck.
I took a deep breath. Then I cleaned everything up, all of it. I wiped peanut butter smears off the counter. Put the spoon in the dishwasher. Screwed back on the lid. I didn’t even put the empty jar into the garbage—that would be too much evidence. I took it into my bedroom and hid it under the bed, making sure the skirt draped down far enough to obscure it from view.
I’m on my bedroom floor now. I’m curled into a ball, one hand gripping my ankle so hard I’m sure it will bruise, the other scrawling manically in this butterfly notebook. Dread spreads thick and sludgy along my insides, like fresh jam atop stale bread.
I’m so hungry. I’m too full. I’m so hungry. I’m too full.
I want to vomit so badly. I want to expel everything, all the food and the sadness and the fear and the danger I just put into myself. But I can’t. If I do, I’m afraid that Eszter will kick me out, and I’m not ready to leave the sanctuary of this home quite yet.
I am leaking peanut butter out of my esophagus.
I am so sick of having an eating disorder.
I don’t know what to do with all of this body. I think I’ll just break it instead.
***
The next day is miserable. Ginny feels like she’s exploding. Like her organs are going to burst out of her skin.
She almost threw up last night. She came dangerously close. When she finished writing in her journal, it was well past midnight. She slipped out of her bedroom, thinking she could throw up in the sink and then wash it down the drain. But on her way across the kitchen, a stair creaked behind her. She whipped around. On the landing stood Adrian, one hand on the light switch.
“Ginny?” he asked. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” she said. Then she ran across the kitchen and into her bedroom, locking the door behind her.
***
Ginny thinks that she used to be vibrant. In college, and throughout most of her life, she was the bubbly one. The thin little pixie. Crop tops. Rollerblades. Quick with a joke, even quicker to laugh at someone else’s. She used to love meeting new people. She loved that strangers are blank canvases, friendly facades containing lies and secrets and years of mystery to pick apart. Each their own past. Each their own story.
Now she thinks of nothing but food.
She’s sick of it. Sick of food taking up every last inch of her mental space. But she also knows that, in order to sweep it all away, she has to eat, and keep it down; and when she does, her body will start to expand, and she cannot survive living in a larger body. She can’t.
She saw an eating disorder specialist for a month back in Minnesota. For anorexia. The sessions took place at one of those dual inpatient-outpatient clinics. Once, on her way out of the therapist’s office, she saw the girls who were living there full-time. They were seated in what looked like a conference room, crafts spread out between them. There were feathers and glitter, paints and markers, hearts and googly eyes. They pasted things together, sometimes onto each other. They smiled and laughed. They looked happy.
The sight depressed her so much that she never showed up again.
As I picked at my bagel and cream cheese at breakfast today, I thought about anxiety.
One of the trickiest parts about anxiety-based fear is that, so often, the thing you fear does not actually exist.
When anxiety comes up, when you start down that road of no return, you cannot “think” or reason your way out of it. That’s the mental equivalent of chasing down cars that have no regard for whether you want them on the road or not. In this case, of course, the road is your mind.
That being said—don’t try to reason your way out of anxiety. She will not listen to logic or reason. She has no use for them. Anxiety will always look for reasons to keep herself alive.
So it is with my anxiety around food. I keep trying to reason myself into eating normally, but it’s fucking impossible. Anxiety has already identified every possible trap: too little, too much, too many, not enough. At every meal, my brain darts between these possibilities, backing me ever further into the corner I already know too well.
Take now, for example. Adrian is gone, picking up my bags from Tristan’s rented house in his grandfather’s truck. I’m lying on the couch in the living room, notebook open, recording every stupid, useless detail of the twenty-four hours I’ve spent in this house. To Adrian’s grandfather Imre, who is sitting on the armchair across the room, it looks like that’s all I’m doing. Lying on the couch and writing. I probably look calm to him. Relaxed, even.
Yet, if you could see the inside of my head, you wouldn’t think that that was the case. You would think I’m seriously cracked out or something because my thoughts are moving so quickly it feels like I’m stuck on one of those whirly teacup rides at an amusement park.
