ED Chronicles: Reunited in Paradise
This entire series of posts consists of the diaries I kept throughout the duration of my eating disorder. Some were written on the pages of notebooks, other on a word document, some half-formed emotion-filled scrawls of teenage angst, and others a bit more subtly written. All of them here have been read, re-read, and largely rewritten. Not so much fixing grammar and poor handwriting, but to expose the thoughts and feelings and inner workings of my anorexia-manipulated mind at the time of writing. While the language, names, and certain situations have been modified, altered, or completely obliterated, the essence of the entry remains.
For those of you reading this with any kind of active eating disorder, or disordered thoughts about food or body, please note this comes with a big trigger warning, as these entreis contain detailed descriptions, numbers and ED behaviours. DO NOT READ FURTHER if this describes your current mindset.
If this is not you, please read on. And I hope you take something away from these very personal and very real moments of my journey. And know that the girl depicted in these chronicles is not the same woman who is now posting them here. She is just a part of the story that is now who I am and how I exist in this world.
In the words of Lewis Carrol,
“"I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then." - Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.
I can no longer retreat to the inner world of anorexia, even if I wanted to. I am here in the healthy world of late night drunk food and lazy sunday mornings, and I wouldn’t give it up for anything.
May 2015 - Costa Rica
I was supposed to go to Thailand with J, the first year we were dating. We fantasized about it for months, talking about the beaches we would visit, the elephants we would bathe, and moon parties we would spend drinking out of coconuts and skinny dipping in swirling turquoise seas. Thailand was exotic, but popular and safe according to several of our friends who had gone. It had beaches with bone white sand, a rich culture with bustling city streets, and authentic, cheap, made-to-order pad Thai.
We had two weeks budgeted, with an eighteen hour flight each way, and wanted to see everything. It would be tight, two days maybe three in each spot, and we had to be choosy with our beaches. About a month before we were planning on going, J was informed he had seven days for vacation, but not a day more. And with our time cut in half, my already stretching it itinerary collapsed and Thailand became a fantasy once more. But we still had a week.
So where do we go now?
Twelve days later, the wheels of our plane touched down in Liberia, Costa Rica.
It was an all inclusive resort, with a touch of exotic adventure. The sunset every night over a collection of tree covered mountains, dotted with volcanoes. The sand was black because these beaches were formed of volcanic ash, and got so hot that it burned your feet if you were without flip flops anytime after sunrise and before the sun set again at five in the evening. The sea waltzed with the wind, creating wild waves and a violent undertow, making many guests choose the tamer waters of the pools to that of the ocean for a swim.
And yet, I loved it all the more for its wildness, the thrill of how it dragged me down and then the victorious emergence that followed. I would swim so far out that J would call out from me from the beach to stay closer. Sometimes the draw of the undertow would threaten to pull me under, but I just used that as fuel to swim harder and faster, diagonal to the shore, the way that my Dad had taught me over all our summers spent in Cape Hatteras staying in the little houses on stilts hovering over the ocean. Its difficult to outswim an undertow, he taught me, but you can outsmart one.
We spent the week drinking margaritas in the pool bar with newlyweds, taking pictures of the howler monkeys draped on the limbs of palm trees, and having sex in a king-sized bed larger than both our beds at home pushed together. We snuck onto the beach in the dark of the night, nested our plastic cups of mojitos in the sand and smoked weed. The first and only time I ever tried cocaine was in Costa Rica with the couple from Wisconsin, a wealthy young vet and his bubbly albeit shallow wife, whose accents deemed us Jordan and “J-ah-y.”
There is a picture from this trip, our first night after an afternoon at the pool with too many margaritas that I have on my wall. J doesn’t remember taking it, but I do. We’re kissing on the beach at sunset. The moment before it was taken, I remember feeling the warmth of josh's hand on me, the easy joy in which he pulled me close, and the way he leaned in for the kiss, his eyes finding mine before my lips, looking at me like I was everything he ever wanted, all that he would ever need.
Don’t put me on a pedestal. I used to warn him. He thought I could do no wrong. That I was too good for him. But we’re only human. The both of us.
That beach in Costa Rica was the last time he’s looked at me that way. We came back from that trip spinning on a slightly and subtly tilted axis, where everything was in the same place we left it and yet nothing felt quite like before.
Our last day there I got a virus. I felt like there was an alien growing in my stomach. I couldn’t eat for three days. I lost five pounds. For the past few years, I had been keeping a fairly low but stable 105, a weight at which kept ana in hibernation. She slept with one eye open, letting out a low and effective hiss if I appeared to toe the line, or threaten what she deemed acceptable, but for the most part she lay dormant. However, dipping just below one hundred back into the realm of double digits, she jolted awake.
My third day of lying in bed, picking at soda crackers, I became acquainted with the bowl of my pelvis, the ridges of my hip bones. I ran my fingers over taut skin tenderly and in awe, like I was seeing a long lost friend. How I missed you. How could I have gone this long without you here to touch? What can I do to not lose you again?
Like a shark lured by blood, the parasite was back.