Small Acts of Disappearance Read Online Free Page A

curled in the doorway, it sniffed at the air as we entered and I was sure the café staff could smell fear on us too. We were given one minute each to place an order for a piece of cake. No one ordered coffee because we weren’t allowed skim milk.
    We were the biggest group in the café that day, and we’d walked beneath a building site to get there. A blond man in the scaffolding had wolf-whistled, at this group of young and slender women walking by.
    Our days, at least, had in-built structure, to take advantage of the changes to our chronically starving brains, which had hardened, physiologically, into obsessionality and rigid, repeating patterns of thought and action. My hunger, and its rules, have been with me, always, for almost all of my adult life. My days have for so long been structured around meals, a constant accounting of what I have and haven’t eaten, what I can and can’t still eat, what I need to do to still feel safe. I still don’t know who I am without my hunger; without its structures that support me too, its scaffolding.
    Sometimes we went grocery shopping together, with an occupational therapist and a dietitan, and then cooked: we weighed out ingredients to the gram. We trimmed the smallest streaks of visible fat from our meat. One woman had no idea where to find butter in the supermarket aisles. Another refused to buy feta from the deli because it hadno nutritional information panel. One had never before seen a leek. We wore blue latex gloves in the tiny kitchen, scrupulous about hygiene, and either tried to control each process as we cooked, or shrank back to avoid touching the ingredients entirely.
    I had to leave the kitchen on the day we cooked risotto. I sat on the carpet in the next room, squeezing my temples with my knees. I already felt it choking up in my throat, as glutinous as craft glue.
    This is the crux of it: what cannot be imagined from the outside, the breathless bodily panics, the unbrained terror, how I sweat and shake and bite down on my nails. I know it’s inconceivable, outside, how the very idea of a plate of rice can make my mind seize up and stutter, as if the grains themselves were predatory. But this is how we lose our selves in this disease. We’re instinctual in these moments, animal; and we’re eaten up in each of these small acts of disappearance.
    Inside the hospital building, a converted, two-storey house with high ceilings and a vague dampness in the walls, we waited a lot. We could listen to music, but not dance. We could stretch, but not walk around, we were forbidden to step into the small courtyard, lined with plane trees, at the back of the building. We weren’t allowed to talk about what we’d eaten or why we were there, but it was impossible at times, not to mention the things that were obvious to us all. Westayed in the one room, its walls painted sky blue, its couches hard as lozenges, a whiteboard that was never really clean.
    But what we found was solidarity, when none of us had felt solid, somehow, for years. Our exterior lives often had very little in common – in a discussion on exercise, for example, one woman added horse-riding and sailing to my suggestions of yoga or riding a bike. But our interior lives were as eerily congruent as project homes, though I’d spent at least eight years, by this stage, denying that we shared anything at all.
    This was because my illness started with a physical condition, still very rare and very poorly understood. I was nineteen years old, and suddenly I was vomiting without any volition after most of my meals. It took almost eighteen months for my specialists to find a diagnosis, the weight dropping off a body that rapidly came to alarm me. I was advised to cut out of my diet the foods that I thought triggered the vomiting, and I did, by ever-increasing increments, until the ground shifted somewhere, and hunger became my safest state. Because my illness started with a