Tuesday, May 17, 2011

A guided tour through my somewhat self-deprecating thoughts.



In our teens, my two sisters and I discovered the comforting glory of food. "Anorexia starts tomorrow." We'd grumble, grasping our swollen stomachs after family feasts and $20 brunch buffets. My family doesn't do buffets, I tell people smiling, after their restaurant suggestions. We can't handle the pressure. 




photo by Patrick Cummings

Do I feel the faintest glimmer of hunger? I should get a coffee. Anybody wanna grab a beer? WHO THE F ATE THE REST OF MY COOKIES? Is my stomach hollow enough to justify filling it with hardly chewed food and gulped down drink? I am going to eat only vegetables. No more processed foods EVER. I need to cool it on the dairy. I should fill my grocery cart with only pickles, parsley and celery. No more corn. No sugar. No more wheat! Maybe I should do one of those lemon turmeric cleanses and send several interior inches out my back door. I know what to do: chew my food. Chew and chew until it is complete mush and slithers down my throat like a slug on a slip 'n slide. Or, simply, eat more like a bird and less like a dinosaur. I am the middle child of a mother who rarely made enough for everyone to have seconds. I was always first to the stove with an empty plate (except for frozen stir fry dinner nights where terribly bland teriyaki sauce drenched rubbery vegetables and wrinkly brown beef strips). To this day, I am still always the first to be finished. If I were a little bird, I would pick at my plate, daintily taking in a few crumbs at a time and sometimes, SOMETIMES I would even be that person who pushes her plate away with an expression that reads, I've lost interest in this laborious act of eating. I will sip my drink. I won't open my mouth like a curved bridge over a river, flooding my throat and insides as though I haven't drunk in days. I will sip, sifting the liquid through my teeth and bathing my tongue. I will stop looking at food as my drug. I will start doing real drugs. That will distract me. I won't be thinking about those avocados or bananas softening in the fruit bowl if all my brain power is used to figure out when I can pay my dealer for more drugs. I don't think cocaine addicts eat much. Actually, I'm pretty positive they're usually waif thin. I could be waif thin and sickly! Get a couple duffel bags under my eyes and frequent, unannounced bloody noses. Have my ribs show through my winter coat and watch as my skin stretches over my bones like a sheet on an old springy cot. I know, I know! I'll stop sitting entirely. Stand all the time. Wear one of those step counters and walk several miles every day. I'll lose those ten pounds and when I do, when those ten pounds are gone, I will be completely happy. I will be enormously successful and confident. Life will be grand, perfect even. No, of course that isn't true. It isn't that simple. My life will be perfect when I lose those ten pounds and when my skin clears up and when I can convince the skin below my neck that it is more Italian than Irish and English and should, therefore, turn golden in the sun rather than this blotchy pink.  Yes. When those ten pounds are gone, when my face is blemish free and the rest of my skin is more gold than silver, then, then I will be perfectly happy. No, I suppose that's not completely true. Really it's all that in addition to when I can get this toe nail fungus figured out and when some nerdy lab rat somewhere invents a pill to shrink my feet to an adorable size seven and my sausage fingers to the size they were when I was six. When I am thinner and prettier and when I'm wealthy and can afford a new wardrobe and earrings that don't turn my earlobes green then, then I will be happy. I will be incessantly hungry with a stomach full of diet pills and a strangely stiff airbrushed face full of botulism, but I will perfect and happy, just like those fucking magazines and movie screens.

If I survive to an ancient age, will I, by then, just be wishing for this fleshy figure back, for this moist oily skin again? For this flexibility to paint my own toenails? When I am old and retired to rocking chairs and crochet classes, will I read this and cry out, "Damn you! You were your own kind of beautiful and all you saw were what society classified as flaws."  I remember when I was thirteen, writing very similar sentences in diaries and along the mirrors of my conscious thoughts. "When I have contact lenses, when my skin clears up, when my braces are off, when I have boobs, when my body doesn't resemble a baby giraffe...then I will be beautiful." These days, I eat like a hungry hungry hippo whenever I am anxious, bored, feeling awkward around acquaintances or when I am home alone with corn chips wedged into the back corner of the cupboard, but besides this habit to pack my mouth like the tiny suitcase of a queen, I am extremely healthy. I am alive. I am happy. I am loved. I am my own kind of beautiful.  

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