Women have laxatives

In the chili car park, I hugged two small blue pills in my palm. They were smooth like Robin's eggs and looked pretty to disguise their disgusting purpose.

Do you take laxatives or not take laxatives? That was the problem.

I woke up early to teach undergraduate writing classes throughout the week and worked on my papers until the afternoon. I saved the pills over the weekend. But that night I had already broken all the rules of anorexia.

That night I went on my first date.

The Twitter boy asked me directly via a message. We had a lot in common, but we never met in person. We attended the same university and quickly went to university, but he studied economics and I studied writing. We liked journalism, cared about local politics and had similar internet humor. I agreed to the date, unless he cared about driving from Pittsburgh to Morgantown to W.VA.

We suggested we meet in Chile, not because it was conveniently located off the interstate, but because it was the only restaurant I could name. Despite living in Morgantown for a year and a half, I knew nothing about the food scene. Loss of appetite has infected my life just like I did when I first started graduate school. In the middle of my degree, I also deleted half of my total weight.

I spent the week leading up to the date that I learned everything about the Chilean menu. It's a monster. Full of combos, platters, “chicken parippas” – what it means, and calories. So many calories. Even the section on the menu called “The Guiltless Grill” made me nervous. The lowest calorie options approached my daily total intake. Anyone who wrote a copy for Chile didn't understand the ability of guilt anorexia. I punished myself by eating two dried apricots when one had a white knuckle teaching class.

A Jeep is pulled into a parking lot with a Pennsylvania plate. The laxative was dried.

The Twitter boy wore a perfect purple button-down shirt. He said I was more beautiful. I glance at my dress and it's a new favorite. Not because of the style or material, but because it was a child's size.

He opened the menu as we sat down with each other.

“I've never actually been to Chile,” he said. “What's good here?”

“Yeah, I have to make an appetizer with Chile,” I gushed. I was playing and dressed up in the role of a normal girl when it came to food. The deep, hopeless part of me was hoping that this date would help me get healthy again.

“You chose,” I told him. The menu has been closed. My mouth felt soft and cottony from the laxative. I was fasting all day. Preparation for the end of anorexia.

The Twitter boy ordered a triple dipper with fried pickles, boneless buffalo wings and a southwestern egg roll. I dug my nails into tights.

“The drive was really easy, honestly,” he said. “cute,”

right. A little story. I asked him the basic first-term questions and asked him about his parents, his new love of making homemade ricotta, his high school musical theatre stage, and his brother's death. He gave me those stories – sweet, funny, sad, and very personal – and through that I was trying to calculate the calories of the triple dipper in my head.

Anorexia will make you cold. As the Twitter boy noticed when our hands were brushed, not only physically but emotionally. There's not much room for empathy as your brain focuses on your only goal of losing weight and your body is exhausted to survive with very few calories.

The waitress interrupted the Twitter boy with a triple dipper. Deep-fried pickled greasy little circle breadcrumbs. Southwestern eggs with ramekins from the ranch dressing roll. Buffalo wings more electric oranges than orange soda. It smelled – spicy.

My stomach groaned, hungry for anything. Fried pickles were the smallest option, so I grabbed it and brought it slowly into my mouth like a scientist who interacted with dangerous ingredients.

oh. good. Good like Kraft Mac & Cheese, Kool-Aid, fun dips, food that tastes like chemical processes. Get drunk and need something to absorb vodka soda. Good like a twitter boy, I can romance this fried pickle instead.

I wanted to leave myself in the fact that I put the chili pepper in a booth hidden somewhere behind, with no one else other than the rainbow pepper string lights to witness it shove the whole triple dipper in.

Here's the secret. I don't like food like I do. Certainly I'm afraid of that. Yes, I control it. Certainly I would avoid that. But the food is something I long for. Food is something I constantly think about. Food is something I will design for the rest of my life.

I grabbed another fried pickle, let it sit and put a salty heaven on my tongue.

“Let's split the dessert,” the Twitter boy said. “I'm not even hungry, but I want to continue hanging out with you.”

I chose the frying pan chocolate chip cookie. I thought it was something like a chocolate chip pie, watching our waitress take over a deep cast iron plate. The perfect scoop of vanilla ice cream was a dessert topping.

My loss of appetite cried out at the idea. It was shorted up by repeating the same number over and over again. Calories, weight, time of the night, how long does it take for laxatives to start working? I hit a snooze and surrendered into a temporary insanity of chili peppers.

I scraped the spoon through the cookies and shaved the sticky chocolate chips I had painted along with the melted ice cream. Anorexia zapped my sex drive and that night I wanted to sleep with my pan chocolate chip cookie.

“The woman gets her last bite,” the Twitter boy said. He brooched the subject of “Next Time” when we left the restaurant. I rubbed my tongue against the molars on my back. I was desperate for another bite and got the final sweet taste.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked suddenly, his question tumbling out. I looked down at him in the floodlights in the car park. He had big brown eyes. Flashed cheeks. A smear of buffalo sauce on his chin.

I realized he was a real person. A real person who helped an old man find a polling spot, head to another state and buy dinner for a girl he had never met before.

With his economics degree and political aspirations, the Twitter boy was planning to change the world. I was planning to look in the mirror and starve until I saw a body that I could live.

I leaned down and pressed my lips against him. I wasn't the real person like him, but I was able to pretend.

“I'll drive next week,” he said. “Take me back.”

I imagined another date between us. What do I need?

You have to tell him “OK.” “I struggle with a messy meal. So we can't do restaurants. There's no dinner. It's really the best if there's no food. Let's actually go to the movies. Tongue.”

impossible.

I was already in a relationship. Anorexia demanded my time, attention and love. It dragged me into the dark, cold waters of starvation. The Twitter boy was a person, not a life server. He couldn't save me. Perhaps he will be tied up by a drowsy woman and sucked into the depths too.

He ran over to the night and returned to Pennsylvania. I shaking alone in the parking lot, my hands pushed against my stomach, panicking for the familiar shattering pain of laxatives to begin.

In anorexia, it is all life: emptiness. It requires almost complete destruction of my mental and physical health and almost complete destruction of my mental and physical health until the doctor persuades me to start taking care of myself.

I still can't date anyone. My full-time relationship is with my current recovery. I try not to tally all the opportunities I've lost due to illness, but “What if?”

Maybe the Twitter boy was the love of my life. Maybe we were celebrating 50 years of sitting facing each other in Chile.