Sometimes, I will be driving to the store or flossing my teeth, and I will be hit with an indescribable wave of self-loathing. Today, it hits me as I sit alone in our six-person apartment. The life science textbook open in front of me dances out of focus. My fingers fall limp around my pen. My chest collapses, and memories consume me. The floor of my stomach drops away leaving my insides to dangle.

My chair does not screech as it slides back from my desk, or if it does, I’m not conscious of it. My ears are filled with static. The walls wrap up and around me as I glide from the bedroom into the tight hallway. I am disoriented. I try to re-accustom myself to walking normally as I slip down the hall towards our small bathroom. The door clicks shut, and I find myself making eye contact with a pale face in the bathroom mirror. I know the face is me, but I don’t recognize her. My shallow breath pushes up against the glass and then retreats. My stomach contracts with another wave of emotion. I need to cut it out of me. I need to get the pulsating taste of decay out of my body before it reaches its spindly limbs up into my throat and down through my thighs—before it consumes me.

I turn the sink’s cold metal knob, and an aggressive rush of water hits the basin, swirling towards the drain. I catch the water in unsteady hands and force it into my mouth. As I swallow, I am rocked with déjà vu. The decay of self-loathing continues to eat at my insides. I keep swallowing, filling my leaping stomach with water. The sink fills slightly. As the water rises, so do my memories. The static in my ears transforms into the clattering of remixed pop songs. The memory of his arched shoulders fills my vision. I smell the tangy aroma of his old spice deodorant and the raspberry Burnett’s on an exhale of his stale breath. My stomach jostles —fighting for real estate in my throat. His slurred affirming words tickle the insides of my ears. When I close my eyes, his body is forcing me flush against a cool wall. My stomach calls out in protest with a sickening lurch. His hands, meaty and large, chart the topography of my body. I kneel as if in prayer over the toilet until my mouth burns with acid, and I feel free of an oppressive weight.

When I finish heaving up my insides, I slip into emptiness. I don’t care. My body feels as if it is tied to a rock and settling at the bottom of a large clear lake. It’s not dark or wet or cold. The water is so lukewarm it’s nearly indistinguishable from the air. It just feels heavier as it presses against my skin. I slip down to the lake floor—clear like a pool—perhaps it is a pool, I wonder. My mind is too fogged to care. Drowning is drowning, I reminded myself. The logistics didn’t matter.

I stay curled like a cat on the floor next to the toilet feeling lighter but still sick—still drowning. Sickness is an odd beast. My body vibrates with a soft crunching feeling. My ears and nose and eyes and mouth fill with a horrible deafening. I can’t bring myself to drag my body back to my bedroom. My bed is contaminated with him. My room is now a perverse cartoonish reality. What once brought me comfort, is now a currier of repulsive memories.

The morning after it had happened, my head hurt. So did my face. And my legs. And my insides. And my back. The bathroom mirror held a face in it. Empty eyes sunk in a pale freckled face. I could not tell if the face was pretty or ugly. Looking at myself was more like standing too close to a painting or mural. I could see details but nothing fit together. I saw the slope of my nose like the piece of a puzzle, disconnected from the soft folds of skin gathering at the ends of my eyes, as I squinted up at the mirror. The lines connecting my curves were somehow absent. I could not see myself, but I had not disappeared. It was a Sunday. The lord’s day. Instead of kneeling at church, I knelt in front of my toilet and vomited. This is my body. This is my blood.

…...

I begin to survive off a steady diet of pain medication, coffee, and antidepressants. The food I consume is deliciously sweet: skittles, Krispy Krème donuts, chocolate eclairs, and Captain Crunch. I eat with a starved fervor until my stomach hurts, and then I lock the bathroom door and cleanse myself.

Bitterness is not an attractive quality. It rots the mind and corrodes the body. It pinches my face and creeps around under my skin. I think the ugliness will erode my skin cells and cause sores like leprosy. I think it will become visible and let everyone know how ugly I truly am. My body tugs at itself. My wrists feel weak. The discomfort encasing my lungs expands and contracts. It rises up into my throat and simmers down into my stomach.

Eventually, I have to leave the apartment. I drag myself to class buzzing with an acute feeling of edginess. Electricity dabs at my skin. Beads of sweat dot the skin between my shoulder blades and across my upper lip. I weave hurriedly between the students who clog the sidewalks, and I see him. His profile is visible through the window of our favorite cafe as he smiles down at something on his phone. His body casually sprawls across one of our favorite comfy chairs. If my stomach wasn’t already empty, I would heave its contents up onto the sidewalk. I keep moving, trying not to think, until I slide into the lecture hall of my econ class and into the empty seat next to my roommate. “Are you alright? '' Gina whispers. Her blonde ponytail flips to one side as she tilts her head at me. I cannot answer her. I close my eyes, but I can still see him sitting in the armchair. Memories rise up inside me like bile.

I see myself sitting in our favorite spot. One of my legs is bent up under me while the other scraps casually against the floor. My cinnamon coffee cools on the table in front of me. “Is this seat taken?” he asks, in a way that makes it sound more like a statement than a question, as he approaches our seats cradling his large cup of coffee.

“Yes,” I say indignantly. He slides into the seat across from me with a smirk, and I stick my tongue out at him. He scoffs back at me, pulls out his laptop, and detangles his plug from his backpack. I spin my laptop around.

“I want one,” I say excitedly, wiggling in my chair. I scan his face for a reaction to the collage of pictures currently dominating my laptop screen.

“I really love alpaca products. They're very good to farm. I didn’t know people had them as pets though, that's so weird.”

“You're weird. Alpacas are awesome. Oh, I know! We should also get a snake and a cat. You have to make enough money to afford all these pets.”

“I'll try my best.”

“Earning money isn't a bad thing. It's how you spend it.”

“I think alpacas are a worthy cause.”

“Life is too short. Buy the fucking cat. Get the haircut. Get the tattoo. Kiss the fucking girl. Eat the donut.”

“I've done two of those things, maybe three.”

“That's not enough.”

“I'll have to up my game for you,” he replies. His hazel eyes are still playful but they are edged with something I cannot place.

“Yeah, no. Not interested. I'm putting a stop to that.” I can’t keep from squirming a little in my seat even as my lips tug upward in a smile.

“You were literally just saying I needed to make enough money to afford all our pets. We can keep things low-key without having to shut them down.”

“Check your privilege boy. I said these pets.”

“Considering we were talking about alpacas, the implication was clear. Low-key.”

“No implication.”

“Low-key.”

“No.”

“This is low-key. Like a program that runs in the background.”

“I said no.”

“For now.”

“You don’t own me.”

“I couldn't afford to own you. Given all the alpacas.” His eyes curve like little suns rising from behind a cloud, and I laugh in response before turning back to my laptop.

I gradually become aware of my econ professor’s voice. I can hear the clicking of keyboards around me, but I can’t bring myself to prioritize learning. The memory clings like cobwebs at the corners of my mind, pushed to the edges by a new thought: I had led him on. I let the thought ruminate for a moment. I could have been more direct—more upfront all those times he had joked when we were sober. I could have killed his crush if I really wanted to. I must have liked the teasing. I must have wanted it. I let this happen. This was me.

……

My breath abandons me as I absorb the ten-second looping video playing on my phone. I am conscious of the lack of air in my lungs, but I have no memory of exhaling. My vision blurs slightly like tissue paper is smudging up around the edges of my eyes. I remind myself to replace the air with a steady convulsion of my chest and lungs. In recent weeks, my sight has developed an unpredictable personality. Occasionally, it dips in and out like the swaying of music. I know this is my body’s way of chiding me for my low glucose levels. I usually like the fussiness, but not now. Now, I try to focus on the Snapchat video Gina took of me moments before in our living room. My eyes slice at the video in awestruck disbelief. This girl, this person, this other who is me yet not me. She is thin. Her Nike sweatshirt hangs off her like it would on a hanger not on a human being—not on a body that can exhale or throb or feel. Her legs are thin and contoured—muscle and bone. They are not the thick athletic muscles associated with health but the thin quiet muscles of necessity. My mind battles with the knowledge that this is a video of me.

I look down at the flattened thighs spreading out beneath me across my chair. I struggle to reconcile the hollowed body from the video with the large physical presence of the body I am a part of. One of them must be false, I decide. I press my fingers into the squishy mass of my leg, leaving yellow splotches that gradually fade. I drag a fingernail from the knot of my knee to the trembling flesh of my inner thigh, leaving a white scrape that curves like the trembling arc of an uncertain jawline. This is real. My eyes may have been deceived by the video but my sense of touch is not. I watch the scratch fade. Its edges blur like the static of the horizon as it shifts from evening to night. The mark I make is a confusion of parts before the ash of my regular flesh reasserts its claim. This momentary bloom of pain is real. This body is real. I scratch until the line on my thigh loses its ashy skin color. As I scratch, skin curls up like eraser shavings under my fingernails. I stop only when the red slash on my thigh is permanent. There, I think. I am in control.

……

With the scratches comes a new set of inconveniences. Now, there are small scratches on my hands from when my legs, hidden beneath my jeans, are out of reach of my roaming fingernails. I suck on my index finger right above the joint that keeps my finger tethered to my hand. My hand is red and bleeding. It needs to be cared for. I tug tufts of fluff out of the cut and roll them onto the floor. I need a bandaid, but I know I will not get one. I need this more. I need the pain more than I need the healing.

I crush Oreos, stir them into a bowl of vanilla ice cream, and begin eating. My stomach feels coated in a thick sludge. I feel soft and gooey. My pants feel too tight. I feel fat. My hair feels greasy and unwashed. I continued eating the ice cream well beyond when my body begs me to stop. I keep eating until I’m certain I won’t be able to hold it down, and then I move to the clean white bathroom. The bathroom is my own little surgical room where I operate on myself like a surgeon operating on a cancer patient. I force out the cancer inside me. Vomiting is just like crying. Both are a process of emptying. I drain myself until I’m too tired to think or feel. I close my eyes and let darkness hold me. By now, I am accustomed to drowning.

……

I sit in the passenger seat of Gina’s car, resentful of the way my body takes up space. Gina insists on taking me grocery shopping. A demand that I comply with dismissively. Small black earbuds loosely cling to the inside of my ears and pump rock music against my eardrums. Gina’s hands wring against the steering wheel. “Turn that down,” she pleads, “ I don’t know how you can think with that incessant clashing.” My hands lie unmoving across my lap, making no move to adjust the volume. Her voice muffles as the music crescendos into the refrain. Out the window, the grass is dead, and the sky is a flat gray mass. Gina tugs my left earbud out causing an unexpected vacuum of noise that she does not hesitate to fill. “Are you even listening to me?”

“Obviously not.” I reach back for the earbud and then cradle it in my lap instead of putting it back in my ear.

“I was saying, I’m worried about you. You’re so thin.”

“That’s kinda the point,” I can’t process why she sounds so angry with me. We’ve always talked about getting fit, losing weight, and becoming hot. Now that I am finally committing to it, she is angry?

“You’re too thin. You need to start eating again.”

“I eat,” I say. It is the truth, and it confuses her.

“Look,” she demands. She scrolls through her phone before pressing it into my hands. I look down at a photo of us from over the summer. I see bright swinging dresses and dazzling smiles. “Look at this picture. Look at this girl. She is beautiful. She is not fat. She does not need to starve herself.” Gina’s voice rises in pitch and her eyes lift out of her flushed face.

“I… I’m not,” I say. My gaze stutters from her imploring face to her phone. The interesting thing is I can see it. The girl in the photo is pretty and fit and smiling like a little yellow sun. I marvel at the reality that I ever thought she was not wonderful and perfect and bright. “I think I just need some water right now,” I stammer as my vision steams over, and the picture begins to blur.

“You need a lot more than water. You need food, and you need to let your body deal with it in its own way.”

“I’m not gonna let anything happen to me.” My shoulders rise defensively. “Gina, I have everything under control.”

“No, you don’t! You look like a fucking string bean. I can’t just watch you do this to yourself. You’re just going to keep thinning out till there is nothing left, and I can’t let that happen. Please, please let me help you.” Her plea hangs in a confrontational silence I feel no obligation to fill—that I’m too tired to fill. She waits, and I look back out the window at the dead grass until her words split the silence again, “I’m just trying to help you. You have to open up and talk to me. Your actions aren't just affecting you. You are hurting those of us who care about you.”

“Maybe I'm just a bitch.” My lips twitch up, but my eyes are flat and lifeless. She is digging around inside me for something that isn’t there. Nothing is left in me. I force everything out with the repetitive and insistent hommage I pay my toilet after a meal. I have spent the last two months emptying myself.

“I don't think so.” Her voice is gentle, “I want my friend back. What happened that night?”

“It was a real shit show.”

“I don't really know the whole picture.”

“And you never will.”

“I still don’t think anything can touch the soul and that's all that matters. You can talk to me.” Her hand brushes my shoulder gently. I don’t even have the strength to dodge the contact. My inability to avoid her touch bothers me. It makes me feel complicit somehow.

“I'm getting out of the car now,” I reply, my words a slab of cement solidifying the distance between us. “Thanks for the ride, but I can take it from here.” I let the car door slam in goodbye.

Later, I curl loosely on the tile floor of my bathroom. Stomach acid buzzes like pop rocks in my mouth, and I feel grateful. Grateful to him for turning my bathroom into a hospital room where I surgically and methodically removed the bad from my body. Grateful to him for jumpstarting the puddle of self-loathing that lay dormant in me for so long. I am grateful that it happened—that I had let it happen. Letting is a passive action. Because of him, I will no longer be a passive participant in the creation and use of my own body. I actively shape and create it with my actions. I define its edges and taught lines. I engrave its markings and orchestrate its bruises, and I will never let someone else do it again.