white
February 11, 2009
The first time is always the worst.
Like most first times, you are uncertain about the right way to do things. Sure, you’ve read about it on the Internet, they hint about it in the magazines and you have a general idea of how it’s supposed to be, but you never really think about the mechanics of it all.
How far should your finger go down your throat? Will it hurt? Should you use the sink or the shower drain? Perhaps the toilet bowl for easy cleaning? Should you leave the water running so no one gets suspicious?
You focus on the mechanics because you don’t want to think about everything else. The “how”, the “why” and the “what happens after this”, those questions you banish to the depths of your consciousness. You will deal with the unpleasantries later.
You make a couple of choices. You choose the shower drain and leave the water running. Your finger goes in just enough to induce your gag reflex.
Nothing happens.
You try again. It hurts, just a tad, as if your body is saying, “Are you sure about this? We can always stop and say it never happened.”
You ignore this, you try a few more times and bile starts shooting up like mercury, going the wrong way up your throat. And then there it goes.
It isn’t as unpleasant as you thought. (Though you didn’t expect the whole exercise to bear so little. You chalk it up to inexperience, and make a mental note to do a “before and after” the next time.)
Slowly, you get used to the mechanics. You start putting food into categories of “easy-to-regurgitate” (chocolate, soup) and “only-eat-when-you-can’t-avoid-it” (bread, meat). You eat in your room, alone, where no one will judge you for eating a whole family block of Cadbury’s Milk Chocolate by yourself. Later you secretly marvel at the mass of brown liquid meandering slowly on the bathroom tiles, and feel a strange sense of power at having denied it of its original destiny. (It’s scary when thoughts like these start becoming part of the “normal” repertoire.)
The first time is always the worst, because you so easily forget.
That when you are bent, eyeballing the cracks in the white ceramic, saliva trailing uncontrollably down your chin, feeling the blood in your head and tears in your eyes, you forget.
You forget that you are worthy of anything at all.
