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The Things I’ve Swallowed
Paige Lalain
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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents
Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other
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My grandpa telling me I need to lose weight on the morning of my grandma’s funeral, explaining, “It’s OK for boys to be husky, but not girls,” and him meaning well. The embedded knowledge by eight years old that licking a lollipop could draw men’s eyes, and the instinct to perform when I was given one. Boys in second grade inventing songs about my body, the lyrics of which I’ve forgotten in mind but not nervous system. Two dipshits named Alex and Grant ruling that my boobs were apples on a scale from grapes to melons. All three of my fifth-grade best friends moving away at once—England, Arizona, Ohio—how overjoyed I was when one of them moved back home, and her telling me I’d gotten plump while thwapping me with a lunchbox (what?).
A girl named Chandler changing my name to “fat bitch” in middle school, and that catching like a stomach bug. The cream cheese and sausage sandwiches I’d pound after school while watching episodes of A Haunting; blanketing myself past my forehead and sleeping like the dead, my arms a railroad crossing sign over my heart. Being shooed into an armoire in my basement while two boys fought over who got to kiss my friend; peering through the white slats like a fence my body couldn’t cross. The early-aughts computer game where I perfected a doll version of myself, and meeting my “late teens” “boyfriend” there as a child. The photos he eventually wanted. The nickname he gave me: pobrecita, “poor little girl,” “little vulnerable one.”
A boy in sophomore English touching me during class (let me explain: I’d lost weight, my Miss Me jeans were tight, and my bras were neon pink) and my awkward giggles, the teacher telling us to please quiet down, equal parts of me enjoying the attention but hating the scolding. A boy junior year convincing me that being good with my tongue was a greater honor than being loved back (let me explain: I’d gained weight). A kiwi skin-haired, Rothko-eyed guy at Mizzou asking me if I wanted to make out before I went down on him, and that being my first kiss. Tech9ne, a Missouri rapper named after a pistol, booming in his dorm room. Him firing in my mouth. Him saying, “You’re a natural,” to the sucking, not the smooching. A man I sold newspaper ads to taking me to the back of his store and saying he’d like to place a seed in me through this partnership, the way it hung in the air like a wink.
The offer of a one-thousand-dollar shopping spree if I lost “the weight.” Nutrisystem chicken cacciatore. Smart for Life bars grief-thick and cork-dry. 100 Calorie Packs Oreo thin crisps, just lousy black crackers with flecks of white dust. Being hailed as an inspiration, a force of ironfisted will. Zero-Weight Watchers-points frozen grapes and dill pickles and yellow mustard. The cartilaginous chunks in Blue Ribbon “Naked Nuggets,” the texture of flesh erasers. A beauty pageant invitation in my mailbox, like a message from a new land. Green Tea Fat Burning pills from Costco. Phentermine and Vyvanse. Diuretics and laxatives. That potato chip at a party like an opioid on my taste buds. Two fingernails on the epiglottis. A spoon down the throat. A whole lot of nothing. A whole bunch of everything. The fossil smell of rubber as I toppled tractor tires. The taste of guillotined grass as I slammed football tackle dummies into the earth. The salt-slime of sweat after a run where I’d covered myself in plastic, like my body was a kill room.
My reflection puffing and swelling like a marshmallow in the microwave. My reflection prying my smile open so big and wide my head split in half, and a river poured from it.
Neither of those observations being real.
News from a doctor that my heart had taken a beating. Several sloshing bags of intravenous fluids. A Tang-orange potassium solution. A heart monitor. A fall risk bracelet. Two months in a program where I was met in the parking lot each morning by the statue of a saint. Fear foods— nachos with liquid cheese, a root beer float, a brownie, a slice of cake—sipped and chewed like needles in my gums, injecting a kind of medicine. The gulp of learning the word “fat” is a descriptor, not a blow to the back of the knees. The realization that when all of this started, I had committed no crime. I had simply bloomed, plush and petaled, in a world full of buds.
When I vomited up everything I’d stomached, the contents were stark and boundless as melanoma. I fed my emptied belly something delicious.
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While drafting my memoir, I’ve been exploring the timeline of my body and feeling the nerve endings of my struggle with eating disorders. While there are probably countless formative moments—some imperceptible, even—I sat down and briefly listed what first came to mind. When I read the list back, I saw a young girl examined, admired, and crushed within a culture that rewards or punishes based on the palatability of our bodies. But I also saw the beginnings of release.
Paige Lalain is a Best of the Net-nominated essayist living in Chicago. She is the former Head Creative Nonfiction Editor at Nightingale and Sparrow and a former Creative Nonfiction Reader at Atlas and Alice. She has a degree in creative writing with a specialization in literary nonfiction from Oakland University. She is working on a memoir.
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