I think I’m nineteen and eating in bed, eating a bowl of comfort on a single sticky duvet. A sticky bed in a cornered room, dimmed by the fake curtains to block out the sun and lit with yellow lighting. Day in, day out it’s the Summer of 2021. I’m in my bed and I’m shovelling it in like a battery run machine, no thought of why, no thought of how, it goes in it goes out day by day. It’s my 18th birthday in June, July, August, September, October, November. Now in a different room in a different bed and it’s September, October, and November all over again. My fake curtains closing in on me and Shameless (U.S.) version playing on my broken heavy laptop. It used to be Friends, the Big Bang Theory, Greys Anatomy. Always playing something over seven seasons long to distract my tumbling mind as it spins, spins over the pesto pasta which I imagine as citrus lemon flavoured. Something to ignore, to view as more important than the life sustaining food I take every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The food which keeps my energy up, but I have no energy to eat, to digest, and definitely not to enjoy. I definitely enjoy the Netflix series I’ve seen five plus times which play on loop twenty-four seven, so many times I can mouth the words as Jennifer Aniston acts them out. But I’m not sure I even enjoy her performance as Rachel Green anymore, but I’m almost sure I need it more than my pesto pasta, and at least now I don’t notice the pasta being shovelled into my mouth by a hand connected to an arm I’m not sure I’m even controlling.
Growing up, light the candles, lay the table, drop the wax, stab the fork, I want my dinner, mash my sister’s food, stand in the kitchen, pick my plate, laugh a little. Sit down and eat. “What happened today” and other questions circle the table as the cats jump around and beg for cheese. Rubbing my feet on the scrappy wooden floor as my toes catch splinters, reaching across the table for the ketchup, it’s Friday’s fish and chips, and I never thought that’s something I would have to forgive myself for. I’m not an iPad kid, let’s mock TV dinners, eating at the table, two on each side and no music playing. Food is a joy, it was a joy, coming together for a meal, conversation, and discussion of the day, the one time in the evening we see each other enough to know what’s happening in our lives. Food for nourishment and maintaining life, I’m aware of my hands, my arms, my body as they allow me to eat my parents cooking. A nuclear family enjoying dinner, able to feel my arms as they lovingly feed me and caress my body. It’s as if they are wrapping themselves around me, allowing me to live like I was made to do. Maybe your mindset changes as you’re sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and finally nineteen. It feels like this part of my life was a dream, a dreamy delusion that didn’t really happen, or perhaps it did but I think I’m nineteen, because I’m definitely not sixteen that’s so obviously changed, if sixteen was even real in the first place.
But now, I am so sure I’m nineteen as I curl away with my bowl of pesto pasta and tomatoes. Retract underneath the warmth of my giraffe patterned duvet set and strain my eyes as I watch Shameless. That’s probably why I’m blind. It’s November and December, where it was supposed to heal and regain health but instead, I’m hungry and cocooning myself, hiding away. God forbid anyone sees me like this. Or perhaps they will and take pity on the rat underneath the covers in the dark, the rat with a headache that throbs from lack of water, my pretty rat with greasy hair and infected piercings who doesn’t care for himself enough.
The bed, the duvet, the pillows, the toys, the blankets, the rug, the square walls, the posters, the laptop are all sufficient hiding places for the little game of hide and seek me and my rat so love to play. Distant chatter from outside the public window, through the fake curtains and across the grass bring an element of reality to my mind. The occasional slamming of doors from outside my own brings my poor heart to speed up its beat, and I lock my door and retract back to the hidden comfort of my single bed and single sticky duvet. It’s shameful, shame on you, shame on my pretty rat and shame on me for allowing it, but no one will find me here and I guess that makes it ok. If no one knows then no one can do anything to stop it tumbling, to stop the big and fast chain of bad reactions, no one can ridicule me or compare me to another, or to an idea that they have in their cute little head about where, what, and how I should be eating. What I should be keeping myself alive with. But anyway, I keep myself alive by distraction, and lying almost, but not quite peacefully in my bed of shame and embarrassment.
Is it an act, am I putting on a play?
Dim the lights. light the candles. draw the red, velvet, luxurious curtains. uncover my small body on a wooden platform and wave my arms around so dramatically. The orchestra crescendos intensely and I swing my head back. The audience watches in disgust and concern as I mechanically move my arms, like a sick habit that I don’t remember starting, as I feed myself. Everyone’s eyes eager to observe my three meals a day, after all they did pay for this, I think? They have been tricked; they think they have paid to see the greatest actor of our time perform the energised and delusional happy act of eating. I think this is wrong. Yes, they have paid, but what they are watching is my pretty, greasy rat transforming into a beautiful and elegantly strong stallion. Performing to them something so fake and ordinary that the audience assumes it is reality. What fools they are. You are all fools. I don’t think I’m a fool, but my heart knows that I am, and the poor, sweet, greasy pretty rat doesn’t know any better. We cannot blame him, but I might just call him weak anyway. Where better to put the blame than on myself.