And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart:
Your seeds shall live in my body,
And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart,
And your fragrance shall be my breath,
And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.”
― Khalil Gibran
My mother taught me the pleasure of food.
She taught me bleeding pomegranates and sour rhubarb pies. She taught me swollen, purple grapes and wild strawberries, ripe and bursting at the seams. She taught me pound cake and apples, Nutella on saltine crackers, little sugar cookies shaped like reindeer, and Santa Claus. She taught me to swallow my pride, devour life whole, and chew on a thought before saying it aloud. She taught me to spill the beans, to plant walnuts and pears for my heirs, to have my cake and eat it, too. She taught me to take it with a pinch of salt and not to cry over spilled milk. I learned to read with cookbooks: Better Homes and The Joy of Cooking, Betty Crocker and Fannie Farmer. Food was her language of love, the expression of her sorrow, the measure of all things she carried with her into and out of the kitchen.
On weeknights, we ate together—three-hour meals that stretched long into the forbidden folds of night. It was a privilege to stay up so late. Food was my ticket to the nocturnal realm inhabited only by adults. We ate asparagus with butter, soft cinnamon rolls, and juicy crab claws sending splinters of bone across the table. We ate boeuf bourguignon and apple pie a la mode, fragments of her childhood stitched together on my plate. On weekends, we made sandwiches—or stopped by Chirping Chicken for spicy barbecue chicken and warm pillows of pita bread—and walked to Strawberry Fields, where we ate amongst the bloodroot and dogwood, the sycamore trees peeling their skins like molting snakes. Or we drove upstate and went camping at Huckleberry Point, where my father made powdered eggs and waffles before sunrise so that when I emerged from the tent, the food would be steaming in the spiced chill of dawn. These are my fondest memories: catching fireflies between my hands, the metallic taste of their bitter blood when I crushed them between my fingers.
Food was, in our home, a container of implicit meaning. A peanut butter sandwich was an expression of disappointment. A pot roast, a declaration of love. My mother not only taught me to eat but also how to make sense of food—how to read between the buns. But where there is meaning, there is duplicity. Food was my mother’s truth—but it was also the first and only lie she ever told me.
In the summer of 2021, I lost my sense of taste—or rather, the fibers of perception tangled with memory, currents crossed, and the pleasure of eating was lost in translation. Yogurt was mud. Coffee was bleach. Water was blood. I had SARS-CoV-2, a virus with the peculiar side effect of parosmia, the loss or distortion of smell and taste. Millions of us surrendered our senses to the disease. It was, as the title of one New York Times article proclaimed, “a strange grief.” Parosmia is distressing in the way only loss can be. It wrenches perception loose from its hinges, amplifies the white roar of a starved imagination. It tears us from the tissue of collective experience.
We, the afflicted, found one another in message boards and Facebook groups.
“I feel miserable and petrified it will never return,” wrote one.
“I am a food blogger and have had no taste for three months. Now I just feel broken because I can’t enjoy anything,” wrote another.
“I am so mentally drained,” wrote a third.
Parosmia, in the manner of grief, fragments, and scatters, such that all of one’s time is spent picking up the pieces again. There is the sensation of being wrenched from the roots, dislocated, dispersed into the weaker arteries of the remaining senses. The sensory apparatus is our only means of marking the cadence and rhythm of life. To lose one’s sense of smell and taste is to disrupt the dream, to sever the crackle and burn of memory, to live in a liminal space unmarked by the passage of time. If, as Nabokov said, one is always at home in one’s past, then those deprived of taste are perpetually homesick.
Losing a sense is not unlike losing a limb. Many with parosmia experience phantom smells—phantosmia—much like amputees experience phantom limbs. The brain manifests what the nose cannot. Phantom smells can range from the pleasurable—a lover’s skin, the pink belly of a cherry blossom—to the downright nauseating. Most people describe a peculiar stench of burning rubber or rotting food. Others smell terrible things for which they have no words. Starved for smells, the body conjures phantoms.
Smells—and, by extension, tastes—make up the language of our lives. A 2014 study reveals that we can distinguish over a trillion scents—a repertoire that far exceeds any historical estimate. Alas, our lexicon pales in comparison—most people know only up to 35,000 words. Language shapes perception—without words, we cannot have the experience. Still, we use smells to determine what’s safe to eat, when our dogs need a bath, what to wear, and when to do laundry. We use smells to choose our homes and our partners. Scents can summon longing or memory. They can arouse yearning or suspicion, nostalgia or disgust. In negotiating the world around us, scents demarcate the boundaries between Self and Other, painting a vivid picture of who we are and what we value. They pave the texture of identity, nourish the richness of memory—to lose them is to collapse the dimensions of the Self.
I remember my mother as a panoply of smells: the dusky aroma of hair under a dryer, the lingering scent of jasmine on salted skin. I conjure her shadow from the taste of almonds, the bitter bite of licorice. Smell and taste are indelibly linked to memory—and memory is the thread that weaves through every iteration of the Self across time, lending the illusion of fluidity and coherence to fleeting flashes of subjective experience. Marcel Proust, who sought to capture the intrinsic ties between sensory input and selfhood in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, first coined the term “involuntary memory” to describe this phenomenon. Upon sinking his teeth into the buttery flesh of a tea-soaked madeleine, he is whisked through the current of memory, transposed to the hazy, luminous past. He writes: “No sooner had the warm liquid and the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place.” The vaporous tendrils of vague recollection assemble and materialize into an immersive experience—Sunday mornings at Combray with his aunt Léonie. The sensation overtakes him, inhabits him— “This essence was not in me, it was myself.” It isn’t just that he remembers, but that he becomes. The past overrides the present. Reality cannot hold.
The siren song of involuntary memory ushers us from the banks of reason and into the oceanic expanse of the unconscious. A warm, oily avocado draws us back to the thick veil of summer. The fresh breath of honeysuckle and coneflowers conjures a mother’s hands draped in soil. Recollections blossom and wilt at will—a reminder that our thoughts, our dreams, arise not of effort but of surrender. Olfaction, unlike our other senses, commands itself, enjoying privileged access to the amygdala, where feelings are forged, and the hippocampus, where long-term memories reside. While other sensory messages are routed through the thalamus for information processing, smell—and, by extension, taste—are directly linked to some of the most primitive structures in our brains. Sensation bypasses reason; emotion precedes interpretation. We feel smells before we can name them, just as the earthy bouquet of paper and ink precedes the shapes of words. The encounter inhibits the introduction. It is unmitigated oblivion, nirvana: the organism in its purest form, savoring the transitory, elusive nature of experience untranslated. There is the entanglement of past and present, of Self and other. Words are more than meaningless—they are a hindrance.
Eager to replicate the experience, the young Marcel drinks a second mouthful, in which “[he] finds nothing more than the first.” The phenomenon is ephemeral, impossible to replicate—the magic slips through the frantic grasp of reason. Colors pale, shapes melt. It’s like trying to recall a word—the searching precludes the finding—or like a Buddhist koan, the answer occluded by the question, dangling just beyond the grip of the mind. And even if we could capture the past, we would find that it is nothing but a plume of smoke—the dust and debris of a moment that crumbled as it came into being. Because memory is not a container for the past but a cardboard effigy of our story about it—like a styrofoam orrery at a science fair. Any recollection we transpose into consciousness is necessarily redacted by the process, fragmented into kaleidoscopic shards of glass that fracture and crack as we scramble to assemble them together. “It is plain,” writes Proust, “that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself.” The mind weaves the cool, dampening web of memory over the crackle and burn of logic. It takes us beyond the realm of language, beyond signs and symbols, and into the thick fabric of experience. “What an abyss of uncertainty: whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail to nothing.” There is something beyond mind, beyond body—something ancient and raw, the fossils of another life. The thing we seek is lodged so deeply within that to claim it would be to cleave ourselves.
The copper smell of sweat and pine needles returns me to my father’s shoulders, the two of us hiking through the Catskill mountains on a limpid, light-drenched summer’s day. When I taste the cloying rot of sulfur, the smell of hot fur, I am swept off into a Wyoming blizzard, clutching a porcelain doll, searching for my mother amidst herds of bison. The bitterness of bile, the unforgiving bite of tears, grinds me down to the days spent clutching a toilet bowl, aching for emptiness.
Maybe it was this my mother so feared: the darkening skies of memory, the violent threat of existential rupture. Maybe she had been there before—to the dark region where the mind’s equipment avails to nothing, where taste is our only tether to corporeality. Because my mother, despite her insistence on four-hour meals, her culinary liturgy, her devotional adherence to ritual, rarely ate anything at all.
When she did eat, she ate sparingly, arranging her food into little shapes, watercolors of gravy and dressing, sandcastles of meat, and mashed potato. She never looked at her plate. She took small, furtive bites like a wary animal, tracking the movements of forks and knives around the table. And she ate everything in pieces: the corners of pizza and the hearts of artichokes, flakes of pancake, splinters of pie. She drank one glass of wine at night and smoked a single cigarette a year—always on the same day, always in the same place. She was in sharp command of herself, wielding authority with a gentle but unyielding hand. She was disciplined without being rigid, firm without delving into dogma. It was a careful performance, one she maintained, in part, for my benefit. When I heard her deprecating her body, it was because I was listening at the door. When I saw her spit into a napkin, it was because I was watching too closely.
It wasn’t until much later, long into my own recovery, that I learned of her teeth. They were porcelain veneers; she’d had them all replaced. I didn’t know that we had once shared the same ritual, the same secret, that she, too, retched until her throat was raw, until the blood vessels burst from her eyes, that she knew of the specious pleasure of the ebb and flow, the flood and drain of the body. But then again, maybe I did know. Maybe I knew in the way that smell knows memory—a knowledge submerged in the stirring stillness of deep underwater silence, wrapped in blankets of sand and salt.
My mother taught me to eat with her words and to lie with her body. As a mother, she taught me freedom. As a woman, she taught me restriction. Like all women, her sense of Self was woven into flesh and bone. She recognized what was expected of her—that she bleach and shave, pluck and pad, glaze and paint—and where there is expectation, there is deceit. I inherited this code of expectations—and with it, the desire to subvert it. My mother’s teeth told what she could not: that all things must fall into equilibrium, that where there is deprivation, there must be excess.
My mother was bulimic. Bulimia is characterized by cycles of bingeing and purging food. It occurs in one to two percent of the population. It is five times more likely among women than it is among men. There is a 3.9 percent mortality rate for bulimic patients, compared to the four percent rate for anorexics. Cardiac arrest is the most common cause of death among bulimics. Others choke on their own vomit. Purging leeches the body of electrolytes, leading to an irregular heart rhythm. Your hair falls out. Your skin crawls. You have random bouts of fever. Your hands, feet, and face swell and bruise. Your capillaries burst, bleeding crimson into the whites of your eyes. You hide it from the world; it becomes your precious secret, your gift to bear. You look forward to afternoons when you can stop at the grocery store and binge on Smores cereal and birthday cake ice cream and Reese’s cups and liters of vanilla cream soda. You shovel prosciutto into your mouth, though you are a vegetarian. You plunge your sticky fingers into the garbage can to retrieve the mess of salt and sugar you’ve tossed just a moment before. You plan around your purges, vomiting into plastic bags and buckets, touring fast food restrooms to evade suspicion. You rest your hopelessness on the bitter rim of the toilet bowl. You pour your memories into blood and bile.
Bulimia, for me, began with a box of pop-tarts. It was late summer, and the dark, bloody smell of rotting fruit coursed through the thick, impenetrable heat—strawberries decaying in the driveway. What I remember most about that summer were the screaming sounds of the insects and the steam that shivered around the shapes of things. It was wet and heavy, like a plague enshrouding the entire town, and all summer, it hung there, unmoving, as though it would never dissipate into autumn. It was August, and already the fireflies had come and gone like candles in the night. The carcasses of ladybugs stuck to the walls and gave off the faint, bitter smell of citrus and burning plastic. The ants and beetles had carved their way through the wild strawberries and the fields of grapes, and you couldn’t bite into an apple without suspicion of a worm.
I sat in my sandbox, a few yards from the house, plunging my fingers and toes deep into the cool, wet sand. I remember the grass, soft and brown like fur, the smell of something sweet and burning. I was bored in a way only a child can be. It was as though the world was dried up of possibility, everything fixed into place.
A car pulled up the driveway—my mother, returning from the grocery store. I sank from view, hoping she wouldn’t request my help. I watched as she hauled bouquets of plastic bags into the house, guessing at their contents: the swell of oranges, the fragrant sprigs of leeks and green onions, the cobalt silhouette of a box of Pop-Tarts. An ache inside me made itself known—like a vestigial organ suddenly swollen, intrusive, and inflammatory. The idea burst into being with such precision and force that it seemed it had always been there: a hunger I had always mistaken for pain. It occurred to me then that the act of eating might swallow my boredom that the paste of sugar and dough might pack the widening wound inside me. I learned later of the Japanese term kuchi zamishi, which means “to eat when one’s mouth is lonely—” the gesture taking precedence over its objective.
From the beginning, there was secrecy—the tickle of the forbidden. There was the question of where and how to get away with it, whether I’d have to replace the box to evade reprimand. But concern soon buckled into pleasure—heated, all-consuming, the strain of consciousness folding, melting into something soft and dull. My attention, contracted and mollified, chewed into digestible pieces: the thick, chalky pastry on my tongue, the syrupy treacle of jam between my teeth. I was entranced by the ritualistic transubstantiation of bread into flesh, of mind into ether. The rhythm of hand-to-mouth and mouth-to-hand was hypnotic, meditative. It was slow submergence, a prenatal cocoon of aqueous warmth and soft pressure. I felt myself held in space by the weight of it. The pull of the future gave way to the tangle of past and present—a welcomed respite from my restless mind, a state not unlike dreaming.
I followed that feeling for the better part of a decade. Food was my deliverance. Eating arranged the disparate parts of me into order, transposed me from the future unknown into the closed loop of the distant, fabricated past. It was oblivion, abandon, reconnaissance. The world unfolded according to my choices: the sharp tang of a tangerine, the sting of salt and spice. Eating was palliative, predictable—a smooth regression from nuance to simplicity. It was groundedness. It was a welcomed departure from the riot of the mind, a return to the comforting confines of the body.
Eating is the basest need—one of the few things we all have in common. It’s the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy—sleep, shelter, food. Plants do it; animals do it. Even bacteria eat starches and sugars, decomposing organic materials, moisture on the skin. Anything that lives needs to eat. Most people—most creatures—have historically had an uncomplicated relationship with food. Nature provides, and when populations grow unsustainably, she withholds. Scarcity leaves little room for pathology.
And yet, unlike other organisms, our aims do not stop at survival. Our complex cognition, for better or for worse, compels us to transcend the parameters of need and delve into the bottomless depths of desire. Food, to us, isn’t just about sustenance—it’s about pleasure. The oldest bottle of wine in the world was made in 325-350 A.D. The oldest jar of honey was found in Georgia, west of Tbilisi. It is 5,500 years old. Ancient Egyptians made candy from fruit and nuts. Indians invented sugar in the first century A.D. But the pleasure economy, the global mass pursuit of desire over need, emerged in full with the advent of the Silk Road. Never before had pleasures—from spices to opium— been made so widely available. This was, historian David Courtwright explains, the beginning of limbic capitalism; “the growing network of competitive businesses targeting the brain pathways responsible for feeling, motivation, and long-term memory.” As industry maximized leisure and capitalism made possible the mass marketing of commodities, food transcended its intended purpose. Eating became something other than a necessity; it was a pastime.
But we are creatures of contradiction. Just as we pursue pleasure, so do we resist it, eager to distinguish the Self from the body in which it lives. The commodification of desire has also made possible its vilification. Desire—particularly for women—becomes acceptable only when mitigated, tidied, repackaged, and resold at a more reasonable price. Our myths and fairytales—from the Garden of Eden to Snow White—position raw yearning as a fractious, undisciplined thing, a hunger that eventually consumes the hungry. Desire—unchecked, unbridled—is a symptom of our proximity to mortality, our inherent fragility, the vestigial urge that sabotages the triumph of godly reason over primitive impulse. Always, desire is an apple: a symbol of knowledge, fertility, creativity, growth, sin. The Latin word for apple—malum—also means evil.
Contemporary purity culture, the evangelical mediation of gendered norms, corroborates the defamation of feminine desire. Yearning drags us back to our bloody roots. Desire ceases to be a function of physiology and instead becomes a moral quandary—to eat or not to eat. Impulse is codified as abjection and interiorized as original sin. The abject marks our departure from animalism, from the wilderness, from the m(other). It draws us from the rigid certainty of the masculine and towards the feminized collapse of meaning. It marks the moment we seek departure from the womb, the moment we recognize the boundary between who we are and who we wish to be. The interiorizing of abjection creates cognitive dissonance, a painful experience of alienation and fragmentation. The body becomes a fractured home that we must flee. Deprivation—starving the hunger inside—is the only way out.
Inside that box of Pop-Tarts was the suggestion of my desire: vast, vacant. It burrowed into my flesh, seeping through the lining of my stomach. It howled with the echoes of an infernal, icy wind. It moaned and creaked like trees folding against a storm. It craved, announcing itself in violent colors and sharp sensations: in the scathing pressure of bathwater, the pain in my chest, the blood on my bed sheets. Like countless others before me—Hellenistic and ascetics, sadhus and Jains—I aimed to starve it out. I combed through Pinterest and Tumblr for “thinspiration—” pictures of body parts: hollow cheeks and sharp ribs, the pressure of bone against skin. I smoked menthol cigarettes and bought Hydroxycut from Wal-Mart with a fake I.D. I brought Ziploc bags of raw carrots and celery to school and ate lunch in the pool locker room. The sharp tang of chlorine and bleach curbed my appetite; the clipping of water against tile silenced the crackling static between my ears.I measured the parts of me with my fingers, making smaller and smaller rings around my wrists, parting the folds of flesh between my thighs. My body was a heavy husk, a chrysalis obscuring the promise of something real. I imagined myself a sculptor, carving through icy marble to free the angel inside. “Fasting,” Rumi wrote, “blinds the body in order to open the eyes of the soul.”
Deprivation was a respite. It was freedom from frailty and dependence—my immortality project. It was reassurance: a reminder that I could stave off desire—or at least pretend to. It was transcendence and debasement, depending on the story I told myself. It was the antidote to shame and a justification for pride. “Anorexia is a contradiction,” wrote critic Ginia Bellafonte, “it demands both discipline and indulgence. The anorexic disappears in order to be seen; she labors to self-improve as she self-annihilates.” It was simplicity and complexity, elation and humiliation—the mixed makings of a spiritual experience. Anorexia wasn’t a phenomenon of physicality but a symptom of my sublimity—“an intellectualized hallucination.”
It was, at first, a means to an end—but to what end, I could never say for sure. Maybe I just wanted to fit between the pages of a magazine, to float and flutter like a fairytale princess. Or maybe I wanted something to hold onto, something to control—the string that kept the world from spinning out. Maybe I wanted to be seen—or to disappear. Maybe I wanted to rub myself raw, to scour the stains of my desire, to be pure, clean, empty.
All true—but not the truth. Because the truth of me wasn’t carrots and celery sticks. It wasn’t clean hair and lip gloss and painted pink fingernails. The truth was this: I licked the peanut butter from my sticky fingers, I ate melted ice cream out of the trash, I waited until my father collapsed into a drunken stupor to relieve the pantry of its contents, vomiting into plastic bags and mop buckets to avoid the telltale flush of the toilet.
Bulimia is a contradiction; anorexia is a simplification of terms. Self-deprivation is an expression of emancipation, a refusal to participate in that which makes us all too human. The anorexic seeks to excavate doubt from her dwindling body. The inchoate chimeras that populate her nightmares calcify into numbers. A carrot has 25 calories; a saltine cracker has 13. The number on the scale overrides the vague impression of formlessness, the unbearable lightness of being. The form weakens, the content bleeds out, and the anorexic is left with incrementally smaller slices of life, experience, memory. To be anorexic is to absolve oneself of the sins of others—the sins of hunger, of desire, of attachment. Anorexia is consistent, reliable, ordered. The anorexic doesn’t have to live with the burden of corporeality—she can cleave the clutter that confines her. It’s a clean slate, a blank page, a fresh start, an empty plate. “Anorexia,” writes author Janette McCurdy, “is regal, in control, all-powerful. Bulimia is out of control, chaotic, pathetic, poor man’sanorexia. I have friends with anorexia, and I can tell they pity me.”
Anorexia was control, self-restraint. It was yoga and smoothies, Lululemon jogger pants, clean water, and clear skin. Bulimia, on the other hand, was a sin of excess, a wilderness unleashed—colors bleeding beyond the lines. Anorexia evoked concern. Bulimia invited confusion. “Why?” they’d ask (the parents, the friends, the nutritionists, the rehab therapists, and the well-meaning, over-involved English teachers). If there is an answer, I don’t know it. The most insidious thing about bulimia is that it evades comprehension. The addict seeks an elusive high, and the gambler plays to win, but what, exactly, does the bulimic accomplish?
Bulimia has no objective—it has no end. It is recursive, folding back into itself. It speaks in cycles: the moon, the ocean, bitter tides of bile in the stomach, the ebb and flow of memory, the ceaseless tug of the past. As a child, I sucked my thumb, savoring the skin. Then, I chewed my cuticles until my fingers were raw, sucked at wounds, and swallowed scabs, tearing myself apart to put myself back together again. There was, in me, an urge to devour, absorb, integrate—like the ouroboros, gripping eternity between its teeth. It was ceremony and ritual. Destruction and renewal. Inception and completion.
A psychoanalyst might say I was stuck in the oral stage, lulled by the rote repetition of hand-to-mouth. A therapist might say it was because my parents fought. Because my mother did it too. Because I watched her die. Because I couldn’t save her. The nutritionist said it was because of magazines and supermodels. The rehab coordinator said it was a disease. The 12-steppers said it was a spiritual malady. Other girls said I wanted to be skinny. A medium said it was my inheritance. My mother said one must suffer to be beautiful.
Eating was submergence; purging was the breath of fresh air. Both were necessary to the ritual—two halves of the same whole. Food was my tether to the tangible—the fleeting touch of the present, the past that threatened, always, to slip away. I ate to avoid being eaten. I ate to bring myself closer to God. Greed was spiritual communion— what are the deadly sins but an invitation to absolution? Mahatma Gandhi once said, “there are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” For me, God appeared in a box of strawberry pop-tarts.
If starvation is liminality, eating is immersion. If anorexia is the eclipse of memory, bulimia is indulgence in it. Bulimia exalts in recollections: the chocolate bells of Easter, the bleached acidity of a hospital bed, the bloody burn of fear, the salted memory of a mother, brushing thick, coarse hair—il faut souffrir pour etre belle.
We eat to live—and we tell ourselves stories about eating to make sense of life, to whittle it down to bite-sized pieces. A madeleine is a vector to a limpid, sun-drenched past. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich is Mother’s rage. Food is our way back into what we have lost, the breadcrumbs along the dusted path. It is the connective tissue that binds us together across psychic distance. Each bite contains multitudes.
If disordered eating constitutes an unusual preoccupation with food, can it be said of any of us that our eating is orderly? I think of fad diets and intermittent fasting, of superfoods and secret ingredients, of food porn and mukbang, of family recipes and last meals. I think of Annie Dillard’s weasels, living as they should, knowing “something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive.” The weasel knows what we don’t: how to act by impulse alone, how to inhabit the body without homesickness for the soul.
To them, eating is instinct. To us, it is ritual—and ritual is metaphor. What other animals do without compunction, we do with intention. Ritual acclimates us steadily to that which is too nuanced, too all-encompassing to understand. We prepare. We serve. We sit. We pray. A ritual makes memory of the mundane, bringing the ancient in balance with the new. It mitigates impulse with intent, lifts us from our primitive roots. Our food rituals conceal what we are and reveal who we wish to be. What we eat, how we do it, and with whom—these things matter. But they also don’t.
Perhaps the disordered eater differs not in kind but in degree. She makes visible what the rest of us would prefer to disavow: the desperate impulse to soften compulsion with ritual, the fragile veneer of free will. She pursues patterns in defiance of the inchoate state of nature, seeks the sacred in the senses, searches for herself in the assemblage of crumbs on her plate like the reader of tea leaves and coffee grounds. And in so doing, she reminds us of what we would all rather forget: that what separates us from the weasels is little more than our desire to be something else.
Maybe all of compulsion is, at its core, a search for identity, for meaning. We palpate in the dark with our meager senses, grasping for the shape of something— the form of what we are. Maybe the body is our only way into the mind—the amorphous, made material, the silence made sound and fury. Maybe we eat and drink and play and work because we suspect, on some level, that in those behaviors crouches the soul we are so set on freeing.
Eating was consecration—the abstract shadows of the mind made physical. It was relief from the perennial self-doubt, the absence inside. Compulsion is a story unto itself—a secret story made all the more powerful by its secrecy. It has a rise and a fall, a plot and themes, narrative agency—a life of its own.
I ate because I was empty—I purged because I was too full. Food was the ache for self-identification, or else it was the realization that there was nothing there to find. I ate because I could feel the past slipping away and was determined to hold it close. I ate because I was threatened with loss from all sides—the loss of my mother, the loss of my childhood, the loss of my home, the loss of myself. Food was my way back into memory—and purging was my way out. Both are necessary in the quest towards self-understanding: the concept itself and divergence from that concept. Maybe food was my futile search for meaning. Or maybe it was far simpler than that. Maybe I ate because I was hungry and purged because I wanted to be hungry again.
My mother taught me about living. And then, she taught me about death.
My mother died in 2008. People are fond of saying she lives on in you, and maybe she does. Maybe she lives on in the shape of a madeleine, in the insistent flavor of salt. Maybe she lives on in the cloying taste of ripe strawberries— or in a box of pop-tarts.
Several years after she died, my father sent me her ashes. It was sometime around Thanksgiving, the air crisp with spice, the scent of pecans and cranberries shuddering through the biting autumn wind. I was alone that Thanksgiving—I can’t recall why—and well into my recovery by then. Thanksgiving dinner was no longer a trigger but a ritual I could enjoy in the company of friends.
I didn’t notice the box on the porch—not until my landlord rang the doorbell with a grim expression on his broad, aquiline face. Cremated remains, read the package label. My neighbors, drinking beer on our shared porch, averted their eyes.
The day was young, the possibilities endless. What to do with a box of ashes? Some plant a tree. Others set a fire. You can pay someone to propel your ashes into space, to forge a diamond, to make a necklace. In the end, I drove down to the beach with my mother snug in the passenger seat. There was no one on the road. “Alice’s Restaurant” crackled through the radio. I reached the shore around dinnertime, streaks of violent colors carving ribbons through the sky, darkness encroaching upon the edges of the world, which seemed, at that moment, unimaginably vast.
I took my mother down to the water’s edge, where seagulls hunted through the sand, scrabbling over the remnants of a ham sandwich. We sat there awhile until darkness settled comfortably over the horizon, the last vestiges of sunlight clinging to the sky like stubborn ghosts. When the time was right, I pried the lid from the urn and reached my hand inside. I could feel the silt of her, the splinters of bone, fragments of teeth. It was a strange comfort. I grasped for the ashes and flung them out over the churning water, watching the smoke of her dissipate into the dense fabric of night. And when there was nothing left but dust, I dragged the tips of my fingers across the cold marble of the urn, gathering dust and bone underneath my fingernails, and popped them into my mouth, tasting the grit, the skin, the fleeting taste of memory.
Contest Judge Sarah Gerard on “Malum Malus”:
Researched and intellectual, vulnerable and courageous, ecstatic and grieving, written in gorgeous sentences, this author brings us into the hereditary, double-helixed, and double-edged “rituals” of gender and nourishment. Via scent’s indelible link to memory, she explores the psychological meaning of food in an ode to her mother who, for better or worse, taught her daughter its emotional calculus. This is a beautiful, universal, multivariate story of survival, grief, desire, and healing.