Heavy: An American Memoir(56)
I woke up three hours later. I had not recovered. The tenses in my body were colliding.
The following day was the first day in 2,564 days I didn’t run at least six miles. I hopped myself over to my scale. I weighed 163 pounds. I tried to burn calories by hopping a mile on my right foot, but just holding my left leg off the ground was unbearable. I didn’t know how I could sweat enough to get me back below 160 if I could not walk. I kept calling you but you wouldn’t answer the phone.
I lay on the floor of that tiny apartment listening to tenses in my body. I couldn’t feel the toes on my left foot. My left hip socket felt like it was being eaten out by fire ants. That Thursday, the first day in eight years I did not push my body to exhaustion, my body knew what was going to happen, because it, and only it, knew what I’d made it do, and what I hoped it would forget. I sat on the floor knowing my body broke because I carried and created secrets that were way too heavy.
My body knew in three weeks I would still be unable to walk. It knew I would punish it for not being able to walk by eating cheese sticks and honey buns until I weighed 184 pounds. It knew at 184 pounds, I’d call it a fat piece of shit over and over again, and I would eventually take it to the doctor, hoping the doctor would fix it so I could run it into exhaustion again.
After taking all kinds of tests, it knew the doctor would tell me in addition to the herniated disks, the sciatica, the massive scar tissue in my left ankle and knee from fractures, sprains, and overuse, I had some abnormal cell growth that contributed to the deterioration of my hip socket. My body knew the doctor would give me a prescription and another appointment, suggest therapy, and say I needed surgery that would keep me off my legs for at least three to four months.
My body knew I would make appointments for the procedure and therapy, but skip them both. It knew I would gorge it for weeks until I was 206 pounds, and feel heavier at 206 than I felt at 319 pounds. At 206, it knew I would cancel everything I was supposed to show up to on campus except class. When I showed up, my colleagues and students would ask me if I was okay. My body would remember when I had 3 percent body fat, ran thirteen miles a day, ate vegan, had lots of visible veins, and fainted a lot. It would remember taking off my shirt and shoes in the weight room to weigh myself surrounded by thin women people secretly called anorexic and bulimic. It would remember never worrying about anyone calling me anorexic or bulimic though I was the first one at the gym at six in the morning and the last one to leave at ten. Like nearly everyone else at the gym, I wasn’t in the gym to be healthy, I was in the gym to feel in control of how fat I looked and felt.
My body knew that my weight, the exact number, became an emotional, psychological, and spiritual destination a long time ago. I knew, and worried, about how much I weighed and exactly how much money I had every day of my life since I was eleven years old. The weight reminded me of how much I’d eaten, how much I’d starved, how much I’d exercised, and how much I sat still yesterday. My body knew I was no more liberated or free when I was 159 pounds with 2 percent body fat than I was at 319 pounds with achy joints. I loved the rush of pushing my body beyond places it never wanted to go, but I was addicted to controlling the number on that scale. Controlling that number on the scale, more than writing a story or essay or feeling loved or making money or having sex, made me feel less gross, and most abundant. Losing weight helped me forget.
When I weighed over two hundred pounds again, I would not touch my body. I would not want anyone else to touch my body. I would not believe anyone who knew me when I was 159 could love me or want to touch me when I was over two hundred pounds. As the number continued to climb, I would teach and I would write and I would revise, and I would avoid you and Grandmama. I would continue to lie to the one person in the world who did everything she could to make sure I was healthy. I would learn fifteen years too late that asking for consent, granting consent, surviving sexual violence, being called a good dude, and never initiating sexual relationships did not incubate me from being emotionally abusive. Consent meant little to nothing if it was not fully informed. What, and to whom, were my partners consenting if I spent our entire relationship convincing them that a circle was not a circle but just a really relaxed square? I’d become good at losing weight and great at convincing women they didn’t see or know what they absolutely saw and knew. Lying there on that floor, I accepted that I’d actually never been honest in any relationship in my life, and I’d never been honest with myself about what carrying decades of lies did to other people’s hearts and heads.
I would stop talking to you because I did not know how to say no, and everything I said yes to was a lie. But you would not stop reaching out, particularly when you thought our bodies and our homes were in danger. When the levees broke and Katrina obliterated the coast of Mississippi, and President Bush neglected our folks because they were black, poor, and southern, you would tell your 209-pound child that our cousins made it out of New Orleans and they were sleeping in my bedroom. A few years later, we would meet a skinny, scared, scarred, brilliant black man who walked like you want me to walk, talked like you want me to talk, and wrote like you want me write. When he became president of the United States, you would tell your 235-pound child that the costs of any president loving black folks might be too much, but the violent white backlash to Obama’s victory will still be unlike anything we’d ever seen. We will pay the cost of his election now and later, I would hear you say over and over again.