One Egg

Hey sorry this has nothing to do with my RPG or my RPG reading. I won't do a lot of serious posts like this. I know, this is like the actual opposite of my usual vibe! Sorry. This could be the only one, for all I know. But I thought...I don't know what I thought. I'm putting it here and maybe sometime I'll take it down. 

 

I ate an egg for dinner tonight. Fried, badly. It's a little rubbery, but I'm doing my best with it. I tried mixed in some microwaved ramen, which is pretty flavorless but salty. 

Bite bite chew. Chew a little more. Swallow. It works.

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I don't mean to get poetic. It's not a very pretty topic and I don't plan on talking about it much. But, I've been told I should talk about it a little. When it's appropriate. Helps with the healing, or something such. 

Anyhow I really don't like talking about it at all. It's humiliating; I would almost rather strangers see me naked than know about this. But I don't think that would be healing and it certainly wouldn't be appropriate. 

I don't eat. Almost at all. I've actually gotten better about it; there was a time when that was almost literally true. I've been put on fluids--it's genuinely surreal how quickly it works. You go from feeling what you assume is normal, but then you realize--you were freezing, so tired; everything was miserable and too loud and too quiet.  The fluids feel cold and you can feel them running into your arm; the entire vein chills, all the way to your shoulder. But then it passes and the rest of you starts to feel warm in minutes. 

Like I said, I've been getting better. I can make myself eat; I'm not in danger of keeling over, though I'm still pretty anemic. It has taken work. I'm not allowed to own a scale, and I'm very careful about social media. I wiped my IG/TT. To call them unhelpful would be an understatement. 

Sometimes people are confused by what it's like. I get it, it sounds incredibly stupid. A stupid girl disease. Vanity. Immature to the point of suicidal. And yeah, that all makes sense. I don't think I can put it very effectively into words, which is sad because words are just about the only thing I have in life. But it's hard to imagine my life without it. It's been a central axis around which everything has spun. 

I spent a lot of 9th grade in my bed, barely able to leave. I graduated early not because I'm particularly smart, but because schoolwork was easy to do remotely. I spent entire days in a delirious trance, reading secondhand books, filling notebooks with weird poetry, and gently digesting my own liver. I've looked my dad in the eye and told blatant lies, which he usually but not always caught, so I could inch closer to dying, for no reason. This lasted years.

It gave me an appreciation for Wuthering Heights, which I've four vintage copies of. One is from 1880. I can also recite a lot of Emily Dickinson. It's less useful than you'd think. 

I also spent a lot of time in fantasy lands; this is where I really got into roleplaying games. I pored over them, built characters, wrote out elaborate campaigns that we sometimes even played! Roleplaying games were the highlight of my life. They still are.

I shouldn't make it sound like I was an invalid: I did have a life, I did leave home, I could walk and swim and laugh and all that. I was just very, very weak; most people probably didn't notice it. You get good at hiding it. 

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Like I said, I don't know how much I weigh. But the doctors seem cautiously happy, which means I'm probably back in the mid 90s. (I do like flannel.) It takes effort. 

I've tried to explain it to people when they say "why don't you just eat?" I recognize how dumb it sounds to starve myself, don't worry. The best I can do is to say: you know how you can press on your eyeball? Go ahead right now and try. Take your finger and watch yourself push up underneath it. Not too hard! But gently. Feel the pressure. Now slowly, slowly push. You can get your finger pretty far under it, right? Feel how the whole thing moves? Kinda contorts, pushes back? You could probably, if you were delicate, push something thin and flexible quite a ways under it before you hit a nerve or a vein or something.

It's repulsive, isn't it? Some part of you rebels? You can do it, but you don't like it? It makes your stomach churn a little?

I didn't do a very good job with this egg.

*

Bite bite chew chew. Swallow. Swallow a second time. Make sure it stays down.

Make yourself do this every day, multiple times. Make sure those closest in life look pained and worried and miserable. Make sure they do their best to always support you. Cost them a small fortune in medical bills. Know how stupid, how stupid, how stupid the whole thing is.

Makes you want, just a little, to waste away.