Bacardi for Dinner

(TW: Allegorical eating disorder discussed)

This is part of a writing project I’m taking on where I open up and re-imagine parts of a very short story I wrote called “Devoured.” (See here) This draft comes from the phrase “a constant and noiseless chewing under my skin.”  

On the first day the termites come, I refuse to eat breakfast. (This is a coincidence.) My mother slams the refrigerator closed, Sick of Your Antics, and when I throw a fork at her back I do not see the two straight lines of winged destruction that crawl under the front door. When she retaliates with closed fist pounding on the kitchen island, she does not see them making a beeline for my bedroom. I go there willingly. I do not know what I am getting myself into.

I collapse onto my bed, magazines halo-ing my body, and stare at the ceiling. I would cry, but I’m used to this unsettled feeling in my stomach. Instead, I fall asleep with my eyes closed and lips slightly parted.

I feel them even before I open my eyes, the constant and noiseless chewing under my skin. I don’t remember my eyes shocking open, the scream from my mouth at the moving lumps in my arm, but it must have happened because my mother comes running and when I blurt out “Termites!” (how do I know?) my mother says Impossible, says Hives, says Disbelief. I retort with a slam of the door, but it falls off its hinges.

Termites.

I read up on them, try to find their nest in my body, try to understand why they came for me. I nibble on my wooden bedpost, hold the slivers under my tongue to see if I can lure the termites out of me. Sometimes I try to talk to them and tell them that I am all bone and stone heart and no wood, that I am not who they were looking for. Instead of replying, they gnaw through my femur in two days.

I’ll tell you a secret. Sometimes, I wake up early to stare in the mirror at my shifting skin, a morbid fascination with my own body. I know that I should want them gone, but some small (slowly dissolving) part of myself knows that they make me special. That without them, I would be nothing. (This is a cruel irony.)

My mother attempts to drag me to a doctor, but he refuses to see me for three weeks, uses words like “psychosomatic” and refers me to a psychiatrist in town. When my legs refuse to leave his office, he gives me a sling for my broken arm and pushes me out the door. My face scrapes the sidewalk, and my nose collapses in on itself.

I am wheeled back home. The termites are chewing holes through bone, sucking out substance until I am left with a Swiss-cheese skeleton. My mother calls me Faker. I don’t know how to make this any more real.

My sockets
hold all of the secrets
I have told everyone but you.
I dislocated my shoulder
when I was fifteen
and the whispers that spilled
onto the carpet never came out.

The crooks of my elbows
and knees
crease like the pages
I ripped out of the books I thought
could explain me, and

there is always ink under
my tongue.

My mouth
opens like a hinge,
shuts like a bear trap.
I could take off your
fingers.

I
am disjointed,
old schoolwork that no one
will ever throw away sticking
out of the drawer that will never
close entirely.

My body
is a junk drawer.
You just have to know
where to look.

TW: Mention of Eating Disorder

The first time you fall asleep in math class, you are studying
word problems. Your classmates are all crisp apples
and ripe oranges, but you are a rotting peach, bruised and sour
from the inside-out. You would open your mouth, but the stench
is horrific. You would tear your gritting teeth apart, but it is possible
that you would never be able to close them entirely. It is dangerous
to imagine what could fall between your open lips.

Math is a failure. You know this. You have been looking
for a way to count this emptiness in your body since you
were eleven years old, but your calculations are always
wrong. You are always a tenth away from the right answer.
You are not looking for half credit. Subtraction was never
your strong suit, but what you really want is an eraser,
and the first time you keel over on the side of the road,
in a rest stop bathroom, after Christmas dinner,
you think you have found it. But the numbers still don’t
add up. You do not add up, you are incorrect, a mistake
in pen on a test you can never retake, and all you can do
is subtract messily until your eyes are bloodshot
and your skin is clammy and when you fall asleep
in math class after lunch, after vomiting for twenty
minutes with a girl in the stall next to yours, you awake
to laughter and realize it means nothing that you learned
multiplication by calculating your BMI or that you can figure
the fat content of a Butterfinger bar in 1.4 minutes. Your skills
are not skills. They are mirages, hauntings of strength.

Open your mouth.

I wait in line, my luggage weighing on me. I
saw a mother dragging her child past our disheveled
goodbyes and almost opened my mouth to shout
but it was too wrapped up in a kiss. The attendant
has a sorry smile for my wet cheeks. No one offers
a tissue. I am made of static, a hollow hologram
going through the motions of what it means to leave
a lover. (They can see right through me.) Your tiny
chalk outline is in the window of the terminal. I rewrite
my imagination to remind myself that you are not
dead. I rewrite my imagination to imagine that you
are the balding businessman in the seat beside me.
I am transfixed, staring hard at the navy seat in front of me,
my pull down tray in the upright position.
The only thing holding me up is my seatbelt.

I dream of airports and wake up buckled to my bed,
sheets twisted around my body.

(Just so you know, my hands stayed by my side the whole time.) I laid in bed, rewinding through my day—waking up early to read before school, Jessica pulling my hair at recess, Mrs. Cliff giving me a gold star for writing my name. Mrs. Cliff. Mrs. Cliff. Her stomach billowing out in front of her, my dad asking me if she had a basketball or a baby in there. She was standing at the front of the class when water was at the floor by her feet and she looked pained, panicked. Joey said that she had peed, and I kicked his leg under the table (even though I thought he might have been right). He stopped laughing.

No one moved.

She looked up, saw my eyes trained on the dark spot appearing on her skirt, and asked me to Help, Please. I jumped up, led Mrs. Cliff over to the rug in the center of the room, laid her down with the pillow I had hidden behind the chalkboard so I would have one during our nap later. She started to breathe funny, hard, but there was something nice about it. I started to breathe the same way, small sighs coming from the back of my throat. She grabbed at my fingers, and I was there, holding her hand as she squeezed tight and then released, squeeze and release, and my legs were squeezing tight together at the same time and my eyes were shut and it was getting harder to breathe the right way and my stomach started to feel tense and I thought, Maybe this is how she feels, and yes, yes, she felt like her stomach was about to burst and she was feeling hot, and she started to shake, her hips moving up and down, a low moan coming from her mouth and maybe it was my mouth.

The next morning I woke with my sheets on the floor and sweat covering my body.

My head is pressed to your chest,
your heart rhythm-ing in my ear,
my own rhythm-ing back. You
lean down and whisper,
If this isn’t nice,
I don’t know what is.

When you are away from me,
my pulse doesn’t know what to do.
It skips beats, thumps uneven
and the tips of my fingers
turn blue. Yesterday,
on the seventh hour without you,
my heart stopped, blood pooling
in the creases of my elbows as
I stood, holding my hands
over my ears and refused to hear
the ocean, listening only to a whisper
of your voice.

Today, I will stand with my hand
on my heart, counting the seconds
until I feel a small tremor in the corner
of my chest once again, serendipitous
with the moment you walk through
the door.

This is the beginning of a short story I’m writing for my Sexuality & Storytelling class.

I tell people (when I tell people, in those moments when I’m three shots past my limit and my mouth won’t stop moving) that the first time I masturbated was when I was sixteen, back pressing into the linoleum bathroom floor, with an electric toothbrush in my right hand. I say the first time my lips moved with someone else’s was in a tree with Jake. I am bad at remembering my own history; I clean it up without realizing that I am holding a broom. There are millions of what I call Firsts that are really Seconds or Thirds that haven’t caught up to me yet. (Some people would forget their own heads if it wasn’t screwed on—I would forget my own birthday.) My memory is a gradual failure the farther back you go.

(TW: discusses gender identity and an eating disorder)

My second grade notebooks are filled with
letters swerving over lines, careening
through medians like a DUI with a busted
taillight. I am envious of their confidence, their
bravado, and I think of a childhood picture of myself in
a tie-dyed shirt and bathing suit bottoms, my hand
raised above my head in a triumphant fist.

My twelve-year-old memories are a permanent slouch,
as if I was perpetually tipping over and had only just
caught myself. The first time I skipped lunch, my PB&J
was leaking jelly into the plastic bag and I didn’t want to
get my fingers dirty.

(I thought that starving would shrink me in all the right places.)

When my breasts didn’t disappear with my food, I piled
sports bra over sports bra until they flattened back
into me, and though I stand tall now, I stand self-conscious,
worried a boy’s androgynous shape is too much a mirror
of an emaciated woman’s. I don’t know if I am just trying
to shrink myself all over again, if I am justified in this want.

My handwriting is smaller now, and once,
a nurse accused me of disappearing, that my sentences
don’t take up enough space. I cut
my letters in half and forced her words into
a compliment, grinning.

I still keep bras hidden, hanging in the back of my closet.

My scissor teeth have been skewering my bottom lip
for ages when you look up, eyes bright, and
I don’t know how to say this. I open
my hands, put them together four times,
and jealousy is trailing together with joy
out of the corner of my mouth.

Sometimes just seeing your lips pressed
to a microphone brings me to my knees.
This reminder of a life before me, angry
windshield wipers and love trapped
between dotted I’s, between you’s I
will never meet—I wasn’t kidding
when I said that sometimes I misremember
your past on purpose. Sometimes I want
to paste my face onto all of your photographs
of old lovers, replace my name with theirs
in all your journals. I am trying to see them
as practice, as preparation, but

hospital beds have made me accustomed
to self-serving attention and constant care, a bell
on every nightstand. I am ringing, but
this is not about me. I am by your side,
but this is not about me. This is your spotlight,
and I am just blocking the view. 

Let’s call ourselves penguins.

I have been wandering the beaches
for weeks, hand-digging through sand
in my tuxedoed body, hope ballooning
my chest. (I have been waiting for you
for a long time.) Every wave that crashes
tosses me into wondering. Every bird
that caws brings me closer to you,
Forever You, with your growing, molting
body and dimming cry.

So yes. Let’s call ourselves penguins,
the only birds unable to fly away from each other,
and wonder what it means to mate for life.
(I should say, I am not afraid of forever,
but I am sometimes afraid of you.)
For what if we are not penguins
but elephants, with memories stretching
so far back that there is no space
for us in our eight pound brains.

I am a creature of nostalgia. It creeps
into my fingertips when I smell spring rain
and search for your hands, remembering
those first nights we spent with eyes closed
and mouths open. I worry that you dream
of them, long for their deceptive simplicity.
(Sometimes, I misremember your past
on purpose.)

Once, you gave me a flower, but
I called it a pebble,
even then.
Even now.