The Von Neumann Link

Her

I hate my mother and I hate anxiety. And my mother incarnated the apotheosis of anxiety. She was an ignorant, superstitious, useless woman. Despite her ignorance, she was always convinced to be on the right side, and she was very judgmental of me and everyone and everything, resentfully stubborn. If a black cat had crossed the road in front of her while she was walking – say – to the doctor, she would have turned around and called to cancel the appointment. She was never satisfied with me and my achievements; she never approved of my friends, not to mention my boyfriends. Growing up, I did my best to tend to the negation of her model: I wanted to become anything unlike her, and nothing like her.

She died during the second pandemic. When my father called me to tell me about it, I sank in a void of numbness; then numbness slowly gave way to relief, but suddenly frustration emerged from the void. I wished I could have paid my special homage to her at her funeral: I would have gladly puked all my anger on her dead body lying in the coffin. I mean, literally: I would have eaten a couple of menus ordered from McDonalds, including the drinks and fries and sauces and everything, then entered the burial chamber, slowly walked toward the half-open coffin, and then stuck two fingers down my throat and covered her corpse with my vomit until I had emptied my stomach.

Fortunately, because of the lockdown, I could not attend her funeral. Nonetheless, I became very familiar with the act of sticking two fingers down my throat. Almost all the survivors are affected by various degrees of mental disorders because of the pandemics, the most common being anxiety and other mood disorders, the most severe being psychotic conditions including paranoia and schizophrenia, and, last but not least, eating disorders such as my anorexia, even though I blame my mother more than the pandemics for my condition – thank you, mom! rot in hell!

I am 170 centimeters tall and my body mass is barely 50 kilograms. I keep on losing weight: on some days I do not eat at all, on some others I just eat the minimum food necessary to survive. I often feel guilty for eating too much, according to my sick brain. And, whether I eat or not, when I look at myself in the mirror, my thighs are never thin enough. Those are the days when I think of the toilet as of my mother's coffin and my two fingers gently slide down my throat until I wash away the face reflected by the water in the closet.