Think You Know the Face of Bulimia? Think Again

My second grade secret was a quiet exit from the dinner table, mouth full of corned beef to spit and flush in private. I did this until the night my mother found me panicking, crouched before an overflowing toilet. Last week, I slipped away from a poem when no one was looking to the bathroom, upstairs and empty, quiet besides the dripping faucet, I threw up two pieces of pizza.

I say this to you in a body thick enough to bury a rib cage with no sharp corners to trigger your concern. I heave into toilet bowls and I stay fat. Nobody sees me and thinks feed her. Nobody knows not to trust me alone in a bathroom. I think I learn to lie out of love about the corn beef so I wouldn’t hurt my mother’s feelings. I lied last night about eating dinner so my friends wouldn’t as me why? I just hid in some New Orleans bar bathroom, dizzy, hadn’t eaten since breakfast, the morning before and for a moment, I swear to God, I saw the toilet give birth to corn beef, forcing its way up the pipe again, toilet water rising with it and I can’t stop it from overflowing this time…Can’t convince myself I have control anymore.

I can’t trust myself alone in a bathroom anymore, so tell me this is not my fault. Tell me again how a mind can be not right. I say love your body, turn mine into some broken waste pipe when I’m not spewing sewage in somebody else’s bathroom. I am an empty septic tank forcing my body to eat itself. I am the clogged toilet in my mother’s bathroom. This corn beef secret I thought I could keep, here it all comes, spilling over and out of my toilet bowl, mouth, the room is filling up with water again. The truth, it is pulling at the feet of the people I love. A quiet exit to some bathroom, a starving stomach hidden beneath a deceiving belly. I am 23. This is still my secret and I don’t expect anybody to believe me.