Yolk(104)

He smiles ruefully. He announces that he’s given up. He chuckles nervously and asks his higher power to speak through him, and I wonder if he’ll fall to the ground in a rapturous fit and ululate in tongues. The preemptive secondhand embarrassment radiates from my chest down to my arms and legs. I can’t look at any of them, but I listen.

“Hi. My name’s Cyrus, and I’m a gratefully recovering anorexic and bulimic,” the speaker begins.

“Hi, Cyrus,” they call back cheerfully.

I’m boggled that what I’ve seen of meetings in movies is real.

“I’m also an overeater, exercise bulimic, sugar addict, and laxative abuser.” I can’t believe this man who’s old enough to live through wars and probably protested against Vietnam would admit this to a roomful of people.

I didn’t know bulimics even came in male. Especially grandpas.

As he talks, my desire to leave dissipates. It’s like overhearing an argument or watching a fire. Witnessing a rando who could have come off the B52 bus enumerate all of his shameful pathologies is deeply fascinating. It seems so out of place in polite society. He may as well be naked.

Cyrus recounts how he’d always been a fat kid. He calls it husky, which makes a few of the attendees laugh. I brace myself, searching his face for indignation, waiting for ridicule, but Cyrus seems to light up at the amusement. He talks about how his parents were perfectly nice people. Suburban. His father was a doctor, his mother a fundraiser, and neither of them was particularly around. He confesses how difficult it is to find a reason for it, but he was always filled with a deep loneliness. He leans forward, and his knee starts to jog.

He says that from a young age he’d always felt as though he were observing all the people around him as if through glass. That everyone always seemed to know how to have friends and joke around and that he didn’t. That they all seemed to know what to do with boyfriends and girlfriends and that it all looked so easy.

When he gets to the part about an accomplished older brother who’d been a Rhodes Scholar, a genius and an athlete who excelled at everything, sweat prickles my scalp. When he says that his anxiety was so awful that he couldn’t even learn how to drive, I can’t catch my breath.

This man may as well be talking about me.

His parents divorced when he was a sophomore, the same age I was when my mom left. He says that liquor helped. He calls himself a double winner and says that he’s part of the “beverage program” and that he’s an alcoholic. But then drinking turned to drugs, which quickly became destructive, so he turned to food. His freshman year of college, he’d ballooned to almost three hundred pounds.

That’s when he took matters into his own hands. He’d vomited, chewed and spat food, tried every commercial diet possible. From eating only pepper-infused water, Weight Watchers, Paleo, meal-replacement cookies, eating for his blood type, Whole30, Atkins.

A memory bobs up from the time I tried Atkins in high school. I’d lost eight pounds but had eaten so much cheese and bacon, peeing every ten minutes until I realized I hadn’t taken a crap in almost three days, eventually passing a gruesomely painful bowel movement the consistency of a diamond after straining on the toilet for so long my legs went numb and I saw stars.

He’d had his ears stapled, his jaw wired. He’d even lost the deposit on gastric bypass surgery because at the very last minute he found these rooms instead.

He said he’d never forget how it felt to finally name these feelings. To learn that there are others like him. He recalls a checklist from his early days. And as he goes down it, reciting offhand the signals, I realize with a sickening clarity that we really are the same.

Have I eaten spoiled food? Yes.

Burned food? Yes.

Frozen food? Yes.

Stolen food?

More times than I can count.

It’s as if there’s a key turning in my heart. I picture myself groggily, helplessly eating my roommate’s brownies from the trash in the middle of the night. Chewing around the dish soap I’d squeezed onto them to thwart myself.

The stories around the room are astounding. I experience the repeated diagnosis of a feeling I had no words to articulate before. Secrets I didn’t even know I was hiding. They talk about how desperately they believed that if they only lost enough weight that they’d feel at home in their bodies.

That if they were skinny they’d finally be treated the way they deserved.

But it’s not the high drama or the gross-out stories of abused GI tracts that break my heart.

It’s the psychosis of knowing that your eyes are broken. That we all know what it’s like to look at yourself in the mirror one minute and then see something completely different the next.

Most of us have left our bodies in times of crisis. We’ve been stuck in scribbly, maddening thoughts of what to eat for lunch, paralyzed that a wrong choice will turn us down the road to a binge that ends with aching bellies and sour mouths.

A binge is defined as that freight-train feeling I know too well. That rush. The helplessness. The hostage situation. The compulsion to eat everything to blot out the feelings of anything else. The peace of feeling as though you’re choking because putting things in your mouth and then taking them out is the only thing in an unmanageable world that feel you can control.

Shit.

ShitShitShitShit.

I am them.

They are me.