Milk Fed

by Melissa Broder

If I made it to 11 with no food, I felt very good, almost holy.

If I ate at 10:30 I felt bad,

Afterward, I always wished I’d eaten more slowly, so I could still have something left to look forward to.

I didn’t like eating with others.

Lunch was the crown jewel of the day, and I preferred to savor it solo, not waste it on foods I hadn’t chosen.

“Do you want to be a chubby or do you want boys to like you?”

The more my mother restricted my food intake, the more I binged in secret.

I felt high on my sacrifice. But I was freezing all the time.

I plotted the concoctions I would create if I ever found myself magically immune to calories.

What if? What if I just had a drizzle? But the nebulous calorie count of a drizzle posed too many variables.

My mother persuaded me to stay thin by insulting me. Ana did it by insulting everyone but me. This absence of rejection felt like an embrace.

I’d entered therapy hoping to alleviate the suffering related to both my food issues and my mother, but without having to make any actual life changes in either area.

“You were going to the hardware store for milk again,”

But if thirty people laughed and three people didn’t, those three were clearly the most important.

if happiness could be relegated to one thing alone, skinniness, then one might say I was, in a way, happy.

Am I such a horrible person!?!!

The more people at the table, the less anyone paid attention to what I ate.

I could never tell if other people genuinely believed their own bullshit or not.

At times like this, I longed to break the fourth wall, to whisper, Hey, just between us: Is this a performance or is it really what you believe?

What I wanted most was for this certified hot person to see a hotness in me, thereby verifying, once and for all, that I was hot.

but I couldn’t worry about what she thought, because I had other problems.

Sprinkles were loaded with sugar, and there was no way of knowing how many of them were packed into any given mouthful. From one bite to the next, it would be impossible to calculate a caloric load.

Fear is when you eat your allotted calories for a given time and you find yourself still hungry.

Sometimes I even enjoyed the experience, because it was proof that what I was doing was working.

Just an egg roll crumb, I said to myself. You’re drunk.

I could never tell how other people saw me.