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His eyes twinkle with mischief as he looks back at me.
“Same as last time,” he says, picking up a piece of garlic bread and bringing it to my lips. “Here, try this.”
I have no choice but to open my mouth and eat. My throat is dry and swallowing is hard.
“Awfully presumptuous of you,” I say.
“I figure if I promise to make you come at least as many times as last time, you’ll agree,” he replies, a smirk curling the corner of his lips.
He tries the steak and groans softly, a sound that has a lusty pang shooting through my lower stomach. The way he feels about food, his love and passion and acceptance of it, makes me so jealous. It’s what I want.
Desperately.
To be able to have a bite of bread without giving myself thirty lashings, or some of the fried artichoke without convincing myself I can feel the cellulite setting in.
To have some of the mashed potatoes without immediately running to the bathroom.
Food is something to be savored and enjoyed for him. For me, it’s torture.
“This is one of the best steaks I’ve had in a long time,” he says, adding a couple pieces on my plate.
I stare at it, frozen. Unable to pick up my fork but mesmerized by the way the chimichurri oozes on my plate. Hypnotized by the scents that waft into my nostrils.
Tristan speaks and I answer, but I have no idea what we talk about. I’m on autopilot. My knife cuts the meat, my fork raises it to my mouth, and I eat. I taste nothing except the emotional relief of giving in and the physical satisfaction of being full.
I eat and I eat and I eat, my control slipping through my fingers like a yanked rope. I don’t know what I eat or if I like it, it doesn’t matter – temporarily, it fills the gaping wound inside me and makes me feel whole.
But then comes the realization.
The crushing shame.
I excuse myself with a laugh. I think Tristan calls after me, but I don’t hear him. Unsteady legs take me down a dark hallway towards the bathroom as my head spins. My hands grab at the wall as I stumble in my heels.
Despair claws at my chest. Self-loathing wraps its tentacled, sticky fingers around my brain and squeezes.
I open a dark door and the bathroom awaits.
My enemy.
My release.
There’s an open area with a mirror, a counter, and a chaise. On the other side, two sinks and stalls. The decor is chic and modern and airy and I’m about to sully it with all my brokenness.
I drop to my knees in front of the toilet, the stall door locked behind me. My hands shake. My vision blurs until I can barely see them. The relief from the temporary release of control that eating gave me morphs into a pit of self-hating darkness that consumes me from the inside.
Out, it needs to comeout.
Fat, ugly, worthless,bitch.
I clutch my head in my hands, ripping at the hair at my temples.Shut up, I want to yell back at the voice,leave me alone.
It’s so hard to explain the battle that rages on in my brain behind the perfect smile I put on for others. Two sides of me, only one I recognize as myself, go at it incessantly. The internal volume in my head gets progressively louder until the voice, the evil one, snuffs out everything else.
It wins, it always does. Even when I’m in the middle of a lovely dinner.
The hopelessness is crushing.
Staring down into that toilet bowl, brought to my literal knees by an invisible monster in my head.
