Milk Fed

by Melissa Broder

a symphony of flavor that couldn’t hurt me.

I went from freezing to just cold. The shaking stopped. The fur disappeared. I could sleep on my stomach. The whispers got quiet. I bled again. But I remained engrossed in calories. The constant mathematics in my head never went away.

This absence of rejection felt like an embrace.

I’d be a mother to me.

This was the thing about boundaries: they made sense in therapy, but when you tried to implement them in the real world, people had no idea what you were talking about. Or, deep down they knew exactly what you were talking about and immediately set to work reinforcing their case of denial.

But my rituals kept me skinny, and if happiness could be relegated to one thing alone, skinniness, then one might say I was, in a way, happy.

I would not have called Jace a star. A glow-in-the-dark sticker, maybe.

I’ve written down some words you’ve used to describe your body,” she said, clearing her throat. “Amorphous. Out of control. Disgusting. Exploding. These kinds of words reveal to me a deep dysmorphia—” “No,” I said. “I don’t feel like I’m exploding.”

I realized that my messiness caused me no embarrassment. I hadn’t been propelled back through the portal from pleasure to shame. I felt like an innocent, a little girl who had done nothing wrong. I was cute in my joy and mess.

It would be like cutting off my head because of a headache. But I was so tired of my head.

They say the perfect is the enemy of the good, that if you strive for perfection you will overlook the good. But I did not agree. I didn’t like the good. The good was just mediocre. I wanted to go beyond mediocre. I wanted to be exceptional. I did not want to be medium-size. I wanted to be perfect. And by perfect, I meant less.

I decided that love is when you have food in your mouth that you know is not going to make you fat. Lust is when you have food in your mouth that is going to make you fat. Fear is the day after you had food in your mouth that is going to make you fat. Fear is when you eat your allotted calories for a given time and you find yourself still hungry. Fear is when you no longer trust yourself to stick to your prescribed regimen.

It seemed that as long as I wasn’t actually having sex with a person, I could get off to them. But once they embraced me it was over.

I knew how she made me feel, which was full of confetti instead of blood.

The Hi made it seem like I could have an easy relationship with my mother—as though it were not a trapdoor to an emotional onslaught, a bombardment, a PowerPoint presentation of guilt—as though my mother and I were friends, great friends, as though I were one of those daughters who said, Oh yeah, my mother is my best friend. Those women were upsetting.

I felt resistant to her touch, smothered.

If I was a woman, I was not me as I’d known myself, but a woman with more courage than I thought I’d had. I was a woman of impulse, a woman of instinct. I was a woman of pleasure and a woman of confidence. I was a woman of appetites, a growling beast. I was a person.

Stop fucking thinking for one second and try to have a good time, I said to myself. Never in my life have I had a good time, I replied.

I swore I could hear my own blood. The movie was no longer on the screen but between us.

What does it even mean to be well anyway? Is there some plateau of wellness—some place we are supposed to get to where we are, like, fine forever? Because to me that sounds like death!”

My mother had never known me either, though it wasn’t because I hadn’t given her a chance. I’d given her a lot of chances. What was saddest was that she didn’t seem to want to know me, not as I was on the inside. I wasn’t even sure if she could grasp that I had an inside, that I was real. Sometimes it seemed impossible that she had ever given birth to me at all. Other times, it made perfect sense that I had lived inside her for so long. It explained why she could only see me as an exten-sion of herself.

My mathematics, no matter how isolating, had given me companionship. In that restricted life I had rules, a border, a system for certainty—even if the very idea of human certitude, within the boundless mystery of existence, was, itself, false. I wanted walls. I wanted them soft and womblike, but I settled for a frigid vault. My mother had helped me build the vault. But now it was my own.

There was a love that had always existed between women. It would continue to exist. We were propagating that love.

I didn’t want to show that I wanted or needed anything from her. But the truth was I did want and need her. Why did it feel so much safer to be wanted or needed than to be the one who wanted or needed?