Puke
Content warning: discussion of eating disorders.
Image courtesy of the author’s father.
I think I must’ve eaten poison berries as a child. Or maybe rat poison, or cyanide, or some other toxic, corrosive substance. I must have grabbed at it with my fat, greedy, little-kid hands and shoved it down my throat in big, heaping handfuls until my stomach poked out and cavities cropped up in my baby teeth. And then it must have sat in my stomach, my fat, greedy, little-kid stomach, and rotted. Metastasized. Growing larger but dying all the same.
My body began to reject my fat, greedy, little-kid tumor a few years later.
It started first in cars. The air would be too hot, too suffocating, too plastic, and I would feel it glaze over my eyes until I gagged and heaved in the backseat. My parents did as parents always do and would yell at me from the front seats as I sat in my car seat caked in my own vomit. Car sickness isn’t like the flu or a stomach bug. Car sickness lingers. It stays on, quietly sitting in your throat until you invite it back outside. It metastasizes. It decays. When you’re little, it’s tolerated, but like most childhood quirks, you’re expected to grow out of it. I, unfortunately, grew into it. I held my breath when I walked by cars, cried for days before road trips. My parents feverishly emptied cans of lavender Febreze into cars to try to cover the smell I couldn’t explain. Still, my tumor grew larger.
In the eighth grade, I would try to force it out of me with glasses of salt water, chugged late at night as my head hung into the toilet bowl. When the glasses of salt water became inconvenient, they turned into fingers (fat, greedy, little-kid fingers) that tried to reach down my throat, past my esophagus, through my ribs, and grasp at my stomach. The plastic, artificial shine of leather seats turned into the cool feel of porcelain, of tile, against my cheeks. The years passed, and again, my sickness became me. I became it. I got better at being ill. Puke became a competition I pitted against myself, and suddenly my punishment turned into a prize. The vomit was purifying. It was clean. It was pretty. It was as second nature and obvious as breathing. Instead of my lungs expanding it was my eyes clenching shut, my stomach twisting, and my mouth being rinsed out with water.
Trends died as they always do, and throwing up was soon out of style. No one cares for bulimics anymore; go figure. My ritual had lost its charm. Nevertheless, the tumor grew larger. It poked out of me at awkward angles, scraping against my hips and pressing against my organs. The puking has crowded out the breathing now, elbowing its way past my lungs and clawing out of my throat. In order for this constant gagging to be tolerable to those around me, I’ve had to turn it into a very long-winded joke that I force out in cracked laughs as I hold my hair back with a group of friends. This always happens. God, I must just have the worst acid reflux of all time. No, don’t worry. I feel fine, I just have to puke. Just have to get it out of my system. Everyone is laughing but no one finds it funny. Everything is suddenly a leviathan task for my body; I can’t cough too hard or talk too much, my neck barely has the strength to hold my head above my shoulders anymore. I’m still trying to rid myself of a thing inside of me that doesn’t exist, trying to cough up something childish and intangible alongside the stomach acid and spit. Of course, I won’t ever succeed. That fat, greedy, little kid tumor has stayed with me, woven into the walls of my chest, my abdomen, my hands. It has stitched itself to the inside of my thighs, my wrists, my hips; thin blue and red threads just barely visible beneath my skin. It has held the inside of me together. When I die, the medical examiner will marvel at what looks like a second nervous system running through my body. I will be a medical mystery, and then they will bury me, and that will be the end of it. Even then, I think, my little friend will carry on. My corpse will carry on being its home, as it always has been. I will become it, and it will become me, and together we will lay in silence.