Consummation

I am sending you this letter in response to what you asked me the other day after finding me in your rib cage. At the time, I wasn’t able to answer your question, because, as you probably noticed, I no longer have a mouth. As a result, it takes extended time for me to place my words together and send them out into the world. I forewarn you that the answer to your question, as to why I no longer have a body, is not a short one. It begins when you first appeared.

It was 12:20pm. Fourth Grade. I was sitting at the corner of a lunch table in the cafeteria with a tray of chicken tenders and french fries, scanning the room for friends coming out of art class. That’s when I saw you. You walked into the side entrance of the cafeteria with a look of determination on your face as if there was a life in danger that you had to save. Though I didn’t know you, I recognized you: your short brown hair, large walnut eyes and delicately pursed lips. You looked like me, at least the me I knew myself to be in the mirror.

Passing by the noisy line of students waiting to shovel food onto their lunch trays, you walked toward me with a single pointed focus as if no one else in the room existed. I, apparently, was the life in danger. When you approached, you sat down perpendicular to me at the end of the table. Without a hello or an introduction as if I should have known who you were—a twin since birth, an embryonic destiny—you whispered one word into my ear. Do you remember what you said?

“Disgusting.”

Goosebumps formed down my pale skin. “What?”

You stared into the plate of food in front of me, urging me to look. Then you whispered into my ear again, saying that your body didn’t want food anymore, that it had asked you to stop consuming, begged you even. Placing a french fry into my mouth, I listened to you with growing intrigue, wondering how your body had found a way to communicate idiosyncratic wishes to your estranged mind, as if your mind and body were not one in the same but two separate entities. What I found out many years later, only after losing my body, was that your dietary decisions stemmed from something far less fascinating than you had lead me to believe. It was simple in reality: you thought you were fat. You were told that you were by your friend Emily after Ms. Murphy’s history class, and when she said, “Starve yourself,” you listened. Then it was lunch time.

Despite the spurious words you spoke to me, your actions coincided with them. You began by cutting meat out of your diet. Then months later, dairy, and still, I hadn’t seen you in any of my classes, but each day in the cafeteria you would appear, telling me of your carnivorous abstinence. When I asked what class you had come from, you would point at me, I would shrug, and our plates would collide.

Then you followed me to high school. That’s when you told me about food and beauty: how they were two ends of an inescapable spectrum.

“Food is the enemy and weight is its currency.”

“Enemy of whom?”

“Beauty.”

“And is there a war?”

“Clearly.”

To be honest, I didn’t like you very much. You weren’t exceptionally nice or interesting beyond your lecturing, but still you were always around, always wanting to sit with me at lunch. I was a polite, often too kind girl, and so I learned to tolerate you.

“Over?” I asked.

“Love.”

Then you followed me to college. That’s when you stopped eating fish. Then eggs. Somehow you had found a way to live in the same dorm and sign up for all the same courses that I had.  You were next to me through those four years, no longer just in the cafeteria, but everywhere, always hovering around me talking about food. By then, it was hard to ignore you, so instead we became best friends. One night in my twin size bed, you whispered that food was a mind game and life only began when your stomach was empty.

“Only then, someone can truly see how beautiful you are.”

“And then?”

“And only then, you will be loved.”

You were my best friend, so I listened to you.

By the time we were twenty-two, we had become lovers. It happened so effortlessly. I found you beautiful. After all, you had taught me that beautiful was empty. And so, for this, naturally, I loved you, and we were inseparable. On long holiday weekends, we would visit my parents’ home in Massachusetts. My mother didn’t like you very much. After all, you always declined her home cooked meals. And my father couldn’t quite understand you and the way you didn’t want to have ice cream after dinner. When we returned to New York City, you were thrilled to be far away from the eyes of people that you said, because of their habits, were bad for me, bad for my beauty.

One morning, after a particularly long weekend in Massachusetts, I was preparing breakfast before work. You woke naked and joined me in the kitchen, hugging me from behind as I peeled the skin of a banana for my fruit salad. Holding your hands around my stomach, you whispered to me that fruits and vegetables were burning holes in your organs now, and so you were giving them up too. I nodded at you, ate the banana and walked out the door.

Suddenly, you were running beside me on my way to work, shouting at me in the streets, saying that I had chosen food over you, indulgence over beauty, and consequently, consuming over love.

Speed-walking down the street late for my morning meeting, I shouted back at you, “I’m just hungry. There’s no choice of one over the other.”

“There is always a choice!” you screamed into my skull.

“The choice is weighing me down!”

“You’re weighing yourself down! Just look at the scale!”

I didn’t understand your logic, and you didn’t understand mine. Because of your anger that day and the way it seemed to shake the very core of your existence, I thought you’d meet me for dinner that evening (you, of course, with an empty plate in front of you) and declare that we go our separate ways. But the opposite happened. That night I came home from work to see that you had moved into my apartment. You demanded that we must be together and that I, so obviously and awfully, needed you. After that day, the gentleness with which you once spoke to me dissolved into hatred, and your whispers became screams.

Two months after that, it was February, and you believed that you didn’t need food at all. You said living’s only necessity was one another. By that time, you had grown skeletal, the frame of your body narrowing, your insides waning, your dark hair thinning, and I was standing there next to you still full and round. You looked at me with disgust, and yet still you never left my side. Sometimes, when it was dark enough, you would touch me. You would lay between my pillow thighs and become one with me (I yearned for those moments, cherished them), but the light from the city was usually too bright, showing too much of the fat below my skin, and despite you wanting me, you couldn’t stand to love me with my full hips and oval belly.

Most nights that winter, you would lay beside me with your withering breasts sinking downward and your face, unable to stand the sight of me, smashed into the pillow. I would lay my body on its side and place it up against yours so that I could smell your shrinking skin, your scapula pressing deeply and sharply against my sternum like a knife cutting into raw meat. I would lay there for hours, moving your bones in between my fingers like a child’s game, slowly counting each vertebra out loud. I wanted to know how you managed to make a body into bone, how you managed to become so beautiful, and so my hands climbed up your spine, inching closer and closer to your brain, but you never let me get there. By the time I reached your neck, you would resurrect, look at my sideways body, and scoff at the way my fat draped over the mattress. Then you would walk away, leaving me to feel the weight of gravity pressing against my own.

In the nighttime, I yearned for you, but in the morning I hated the way you couldn’t just sit with me and eat. You’d try to explain it to me. Like that time at my favorite cafe on 12th Street the day after Valentine’s Day. You arrived just after I finished eating. You sat across from me without a hello, and your chapped, starving lips began to move loudly in Os:

“Don’t you want to be beautiful?”

I looked around, ashamed, “Yes.”

“Don’t you want to be loved?”

“Yes.”

“Then why aren’t you listening to me? How am I supposed to love a body like yours: the way it waits pathetically for the waiter and devours food like an animal? Are you an animal?”

The waitress approached our table to pick up the empty plate and soured napkin in front of me. She asked if I wanted anything else from the kitchen. Had she overheard our conversation? Embarrassed, I looked up at her and said, “No, thank you.”

You continued, shouting now: “How pathetic! Even she is judging you. Can’t you see?” I shook my head shamefully, as the waitress walked away. “You keep getting wider and wider, uglier and uglier. You’re making it impossible for me to love you. And if I can’t love you, how will anyone else?”

But I didn’t want anyone else but you to love me, and you always had a way of making me look so culpable for the things I did, like I was so purposeful. I tried to teach you that I wasn’t, that I was just a product of evolution—hungry, lonely, and human—but you would never listen. You didn’t understand how good it felt to feed a body. I loved to watch a tray come from the back room, carrying colors and smells on it. When the waitress set a plate down in front of me, my body would unconsciously prepare to consume: tongue salivating, stomach jolting in anticipation. My body possessed some sort of ancient knowledge. It understood things that you did not. These things, I realize now, are somehow equivalent to the words: Input and Output.

But then there you were: always across from me with eyes identical to mine but now a body so different, so small and so beautiful. You showed me what I could look like, if only I had the discipline that you possessed: an ability to stop my hands from grabbing and my teeth from chewing. I wanted to be like you, and at the same time I was hungry. I wanted to keep you around, and at the same time I wished you would just disappear.

But at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you were always there screaming into my ear, telling me how obtuse I was, how deformed I was, how, if I only I could stop eating, I would be beautiful and you would love me.

As you can imagine—or perhaps you still can’t imagine—it was hard for me: you staring at me day after day as I ate. With a metal fork in hand, I’d look at you from across the kitchen table and wish to see the world as you did, to understand where your skeletal vision came from. Sometime in late autumn this desire deepened, and deepening along with it was the guilt about putting something other than you inside of my body and enjoying it. You seemed pleased about my guilt, and for this I was pleased, that somehow in the midst of your anger, I could please you. Now, I believe that you had always wanted me to feel ashamed for consuming, that there was never any love from you to me, and instead only disgust. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe, you were like me: tormented by a doppelgänger shouting into your veins.

After months of you watching me eat and me waiting for you to call me beautiful, I started to pretend like I wasn’t hungry, like I didn’t want a burger or fries or even a salad. Renunciation was the only way I believed that I could reach you. When you were around, it was easy to fool my stomach into believing it was satisfied, that the feeling of a clenched fist twisting my insides was normal. You were my starvation guardian angel, but when I was alone it was harder, and the less I ate, the less you appeared to me.

Without you as a distraction, the ache in my stomach spread upwards and manifested as a headache, one that circled around the front and back of my head, connecting one temple to the other, pulsating through my brain in the shape of a semi-sphere. When my headache and I got home from work, I’d look in the fridge, the one I had emptied days before, and I’d whimper when I saw its hollowed white insides. From there I would check the freezer, the wooden cabinets, my purse. I would check anything that had the ability to hold something, but everything was empty: everything except my hunger and the way it ran around in my thoughts. When I realized there was nothing for me to eat, I would return to bed, wishing I could feel your bones next to me again. I couldn’t understand why you left me. Finally, I was listening to you, and you weren’t even there to see it. Emptiness radiating from my stomach, my heart missing you, all I could do was sleep away the ache.

After a weeks of pretending and sleeping, it was autumn, and I began to see things differently, perhaps more similarly to the way you saw them. Suddenly, the twisting feeling in my stomach was no longer hunger. Instead, it became proof of my body becoming beautiful, of my dedication to you. Finally, I had managed to turn away from the thing that everyone else seemed to need, crave, even obsess over. In my hands, my body felt the way yours did: a calcium, marrow map of a treasure slowly disappearing with each skip of a meal. In the mirror, I started to look like you: bones protruding, muscle disintegrating, clavicles pointing at my eyes, telling me that soon you would love me back. But still you didn’t come around often.

Some days that fall, when food was within reaching distance of my hands, you would appear without warning though often carrying a warning of your own. One morning before a lunch meeting with a client, I heard your voice by the front door. I ran to you and embraced your body with the feeling of white rock smashing against white rock, our bodies singing into one another. I asked you where you’d been, but you could only tell me that I was on my way.

“To where?”

“To me.”

Missing the days and years we spent together, I begged you to go outside with me to show our tiny bodies to the world. Heading toward the door, you said no, that you had to go, that you had other things to attend to and again that I was on my way.

“Just be careful.”

“I know.”

“I know who you were before. I remember how you looked.”

“Please,” I begged, “please just come outside with me.”

Finally with a roll of your eyes, you obliged and followed me to the client meeting downtown. On the way there, we stomped soundless across the sidewalk. As we strolled by rectangular restaurants, cafes and dessert bars, we laughed at all the people. How they were so focused on the food in front of them rather than the voice within them. We walked and laughed, and our hands latched onto one another, bone to bone, knuckle to knuckle.

After the meeting, I came outside the restaurant and to my surprise you were waiting for me. Your eyes were narrowed, ready for the kill, “Did you?”

“No. I didn’t. What can I do to make you trust me?”

You smiled and turned to leave, but I grabbed your ribcage and begged you to stay just a little bit longer. Reluctantly, you agreed to come home with me. After all I  had listened to you.

That night, we laid in bed with one another so differently than we used to. I no longer cushioned your skeleton with my curves. Instead my body climbed on top of yours. Your hands wrapped around my skin and clawed at the back side of my ribs. I closed my eyes, dug my teeth into your scapula, and named each bone as I bit down into your body. In that grey-walled bedroom, we were two skeletons, sanding their bones against one another, shedding layers upon layers of calcium; our bone marrow humming with ecstasy, our breasts sighing into surrender. When the light shown through the blinds in the morning, the silhouette of our bodies laying on top one another looked, not like two humans, but like one whole person. The next morning, you disappeared again, your voice echoing in my head, “You’re on your way.”

It was because of all this, the proof, the ecstasy, the mirroring bodies and the skeletons, that I learned to love the hunger. I finally understood how good it felt to have shape but be hollow. I was becoming beautiful; I was certain of it.

What I didn’t realize was that I was withering away, seeping into space, surrendering my body to you: a starving apparition who found a way into my life too early on for me to dismiss the words you said, to shoo away the ideas whispered inside of my head; too early for me to know that by listening to you, the little you that was birthed from Emily’s words on a normal day in fourth grade, I was feeding an invisible monster, not with food, but with my mind.

As spring ended and summer began, I grew weak and frail, and the enjoyment I once felt from the fist in my belly turned into a dark, heavy habit; an aversion to the thing that used to nourish me. As I tried to remember the last full meal I had eaten, my skin sealed airtight into my skeleton. My jawbone and cheekbones carved heavy shadows across my face, and my eyes sunk deep into their sockets, but still I wasn’t as skinny enough for you, for myself. I had traded in food for a look of ravenous love on your face, but you were barely around anymore, and when, suddenly, you did appear by the fridge, scanning me up and down, you still weren’t satisfied.

By July, the aversion deepened, and I couldn’t look at food anymore without wanting to vomit. I couldn’t even stand the sound of it cooking or the smell of it in the microwave. The number on the bathroom scale read ninety-five, thirty pounds less than it had in the fall. By the end of the month, my senses couldn’t keep up; my vision blackened each time I bent down or stood up. Sometimes in that blackness my legs gave out, and my body collapsed onto the floor. One evening on the way home from work, I fainted on the M train, only to wake up eight stops past my destination with a police officer standing over me, asking if I was okay. I began to feel dangerously mortal. And you didn’t come around. You had said that I didn’t need you anymore, that I was on my way, to just keep going: going meaning emptying, shriveling, sinking into nothingness.

As the rising temperature around me plateaued that summer, I became haunted by the fact that my hands had to put something inside of me in order to live. Necessity infuriated me. I only ate what I had to in order to make it from place to place in the New York City heat. That summer, women often asked me how I lost so much weight in such little time.

They’d say, “What’s your secret?”

I’d say, “A girl with a voice like knives.”

As the heat gave way to yellowed leaves, the joy I had experienced from a mind and body separate dissipated, as I realized that one could not work without the other. In late September, I visited my doctor. I hoped that she could help me, but instead all she told me was to stop losing weight. She didn’t believe me when I said that I wasn’t trying, that it wasn’t the weight anymore: it was the food, the putting of it in my mouth and chewing, the feeling of it turn to mush on my tongue before sliding down my throat and into my stomach. Without responding, she wrote a cluster of scribbles down on her lined paper and then looked at me. Not at me, but at my collarbones.

I said, “I feel like I need another body,” and then she handed me paper with 1-800 numbers that she said could cure me from you. She called you a disorder.

After that day at the doctor’s, you started to visit me more often. It was as if you were scared that, because of what was said, I would start to feed myself again, and you, in turn, would start to lose me, not me but the hollow, distorted figure that I had become. Because of your fears, you kept me next to you all the time. It was like we were in college again, but this time you were desperate.

With your boney arms, you squeezed our hungry bodies forcefully against one another. You wouldn’t let me go— not even in the shower, or walking down the street or using the bathroom. You kept turning me toward the floor length mirror, gesturing me to look at the body I had created. In my reflection, I tried to see you, the girl with a face like my own, two identical skeletons standing beside one another, but all I could see was the unforgiving mirror: my kneecaps and elbows jutting outward like the intersection of two lines making an acute angle, how obtuse they still looked.

I heard your voice whisper, “You’re so beautiful now, and I love you finally. Just a little bit more.”

Although the words you spoke were sweeter than ever before, they were said as though you were speaking through sour milk, the curdles passing under your uvula, your mouth trying to hold back vomit. I tried to tell you that all the pressing and clashing of calcium hurt my back, but you wouldn’t let go.  You said that it had to be like this after what I had done, after what I had said.

“Don’t you love me?” I nodded.

“Don’t you think I’m beautiful?” I nodded.

“Then listen to me.”

That fall, you held me so close for so long that by winter I forgot what it was like to be a body without you. I forgot what it was like to have my own feet to travel with and a mind filled with my own thoughts. I forgot how it felt to touch myself without thinking of how the meat underneath needed to shrink. My neck forgot how to stand up on its own, and my spine forgot how to support itself against gravity. My nose forgot the scent of my own skin, and I forgot that I even had my own nose.

After all those months of me hollowing myself out and of you holding me close, we merged. There were no more whispers. No more screams. No more love or monologues. It was just you moving about in the world while I sunk into you.

It was like this: first you took my legs and my arms, anything that I could reach for food with, then you pulled me close and my shoulders attached to your sternum; my collar bones fused with your ribs; my neck and head laid perpendicular to your chest. When you stood upright all I could see was the inside of the sky; my face positioned upward toward it. I saw life as your perfectly carved jawline and the insides of your nostrils. I saw lightning once and thought you had conjured it from your forehead. You were home, and I lived there, jutting off your chest, making a perfect right angle like an incomplete rectangle, like the corner of a middle school lunch table.

There my life grew consequential. When you drank, you dripped water on me. When you smoked, ash fell onto my cheeks and into my eyes. When you sneezed, I felt it. And then your hair: shoulder length strands shed from your scalp and landed on me. And I had no hands anymore to pick them off, and so my mouth inhaled them like food, and I couldn’t cough them up. I couldn’t do anything except swallow and swallow again, your hair matting in my mouth and sticking to the insides of my esophagus.

You kept running my head into other bodies and into doors without even saying sorry. And when you kissed someone, I was right there in the middle of you two. When they touched your bones, I wished for them to touch mine, to put skin on skin and tell me that I was beautiful. But you and they had forgotten about me, as if I was the invisible one, finally small enough to disappear altogether.

With time, what was left of me began to fall deeper into your middle. First my collarbones, then my neck, then my chin, and then slowly my face. Soon all that was left was my forehead and the top of my hair, and it wasn’t long until that too was pushed up against the mattress and sunk beneath your skin.

And so there, my love, is the answer to your question. I no longer have a body, because you took it from me. Your voice consumed me. When I think of it now, I laugh because you never liked to consume anything, and yet here we are now. You devoured me as if I was the first meal you had eaten after a year and a half of starving yourself.

Maybe now we share the same stomach or the same lungs. Maybe even the same heart. Or perhaps this is just a fantasy of mine, one that helps me to cope with what has happened. Maybe it’s not like this at all. Maybe my mouth is actually floating somewhere near your stomach, my ears near your liver, and my heart spat out by your bowels. Perhaps, I don’t even exist anymore.

As I finish this letter to you, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t stood outside of Ms. Murphy’s classroom with Emily that day, if I hadn’t listened to the voice inside of my head at the lunch table. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t taught myself to hate the thing that kept me alive; if I hadn’t called you you but instead me.

Mostly, I wonder what would have happened if you hadn’t taken my bones away from me? Maybe, eventually, I would have walked away.

___________

 Alana Saab is a writer and multimedia artist, exploring profound relations of love, desperation and confusion: from one person to another, from the psyche to the heart, from humans to a higher power. She has studied with spiritual healers and lucid dreamers around the world and currently lives in New York City with her cat, Blu, and her spider plants.

Instagram: @alana.saab