𝒓𝒉𝒚𝒔
Years ago, I wouldn't even get close to food around people. The shame of eating was so overwhelming that I couldn't, even if I wanted to eat at McDonalds with our dance team just once after a win. I did go there with them, but all I ordered was some watered down diet coke and then I sat there, feeling fucking nothing but dread over the fact that I'd be that way forever, while everyone around me celebrated and joked about how bad the other dances were.
Things only changed when I met Eli. I'd made the mistake of thinking people would buy lies like I'm dieting or I'm not hungry, and I knew that to actually make him believe I didn't have a problem, I'd have to eat.
After a while, my logic of not telling him to not burden him showed to be flawed. When I finally told him, my brain, for whatever fucking reason, went into don't care mode. It stayed like that. I ate in front of him, I binged in front of him.
Not the tiny anorexic binge certain people have that contain half a slice of cake and a bowl of chips, no—several packs of crackers and bags of chips, pasta either with no butter to save the calories or slathered in it to make purging it easier, entire loafs of bread, jars of peanut butter, pizzas.
It was grotesque amounts of food.
And Eli didn't care.
Hell, Eli would come sit on the kitchen floor with me and ask if he could have some. He wouldn't eat near the amount of food I ate but he'd eat a lot for someone as short and skinny as he is.
Weirdest part is that it was comforting when he did it. He treated it as if what we did was normal, sitting on the floor and gorging on food. He'd hold conversations about nothing in particular. I have no fucking clue how he managed not to gag at me, scooping peanut butter straight from the jar with my fingers, and I have even less of a clue on how he could casually ask me if he could have some and then we'd eat peanut butter with our fingers straight from a jar as if it was some romantic moment.
But it wasn't. Maybe that's part of why we fell apart. Why we can never work.
Noah and I don't work either, but at least he's shooting me concerned looks as I stuff my mouth with fries. Of course, he's eating them like a normal fucking person. I'm too fucking hungry to snap at him.
I don't know why food tastes so fucking awful after sex. Maybe it's just that I've had to look at my body and see it move around with nothing to hold fat in place and now I'm binging on several thousand calories which is amazing and makes it all sooo much fucking better.
After over ten years of eating disorders I still haven't learnt that binging makes things worse.
Eating on the bed makes it even better. It's so glamorous, it's exactly what you want as a dancer. Water retention and puffy purging cheeks.
Those ten years of eating disorders ruined my hunger cues, too. I don't feel full until I'm uncomfortably full, and even then, I want to keep eating. My solution is, naturally, as a normal, healthy person, to go throw up.
As I'm standing to go do that, I expect Noah to be my interruption. Instead, my phone starts ringing.
It's laying next to Noah on the mattress. He picks it up. "Eli," he says and hands me the phone.
"Eli?" I double check my screen. Yeah. Eli. Elliott Monier. Dark brown hair. Deep green eyes. Full lips. Sad smile.
With the whole we can still be friends thing, I kept him in my contacts, and I kept that one, blurry picture Aiden sent me of Eli laughing.
