Old Novel

A Day on an Eating Disorders Unit:

First page of an old novel

(Warning it’s pretty terrible but nonetheless…)

Images of the Edible

She was dreaming of food.

It was all that Gemma could dream about.  It filled up most of the space in her head. Sleeping and waking, her mind was stuffed with images of the edible.  Chips- hot and salty.  Apples- cool and crisp, straight from the fridge.  Corn flakes, covered in sugar and immersed in milk.

At every mealtime Gemma heard the footsteps of her fellow patients pounding past her door, heading for the dining room.  They seemed to live for food.  The dining room was one room Gemma was determined never to enter again.

They brought her a tray laden with food three times a day.  Breakfast.  Dinner.  Supper.  Every day.  The food they brought her always remained uneaten.  She didn’t even bother to remove the covers to see what culinary delights they had brought her.  The aroma was enough.

She wanted it.  But she could not have it.  It was desirable but forbidden.  It was poison.  Sugar-coated cyanide.

Instead she was sustained by memories of epic binges.

Three times a day, every day, the nurses came to remove the tray with barely suppressed sighs of disappointment and looks that said, ‘Eat.  It’s not so hard.  Just pick up a fork.  Spear a broccoli floret and raise it to your lips.  Then chew and Swallow.  Simple.’

But they didn’t know Gemma.  They didn’t know that if she were to start eating again she would never stop.  She felt like she could consume the entire world.  She pictured herself as some obese God, grabbing planets and stuffing them into her mouth, their juices running down her chin. She felt as though she could have munched her way through the entire universe.  But she still would not have been satisfied. Her appetite was insatiable.

On the Art of Manufacturing Fear

Jobe, Richard Adams

Codename Lisette

New Blog Alert:

Prologue:

http://edibleuniverse.wordpress.com/

Two Worlds Collide

The Daughter’s Tale

Images of the Edible

She was dreaming of food.

It was all that Gemma could dream about.  It filled up most of the space in her head. Sleeping and waking, her mind was stuffed with images of the edible.  Chips- hot and salty.  Apples- cool and crisp, straight from the fridge.  Corn flakes, covered in sugar and immersed in milk.

At every mealtime Gemma heard the footsteps of her fellow patients pounding past her door, heading for the dining room.  They seemed to live for food.  The dining room was one room Gemma was determined never to enter again.

They brought her a tray laden with food three times a day.  Breakfast.  Dinner.  Supper.  Every day.  The food they brought her always remained uneaten.  She didn’t even bother to remove the covers to see what culinary delights they had brought her.  The aroma was enough.

She wanted it.  But she could not have it.  It was desirable but forbidden.  It was poison.  Sugar-coated cyanide.

Instead she was sustained by memories of epic binges.

Three times a day, every day, the nurses came to remove the tray with barely suppressed sighs of disappointment and looks that said, ‘Eat.  It’s not so hard.  Just pick up a fork.  Spear a broccoli floret and raise it to your lips.  Then chew and Swallow.  Simple.’

But they didn’t know Gemma.  They didn’t know that if she were to start eating again she would never stop.  She felt like she could consume the entire world.  She pictured herself as some obese God, grabbing planets and stuffing them into her mouth, their juices running down her chin. She felt as though she could have munched her way through the entire universe.  But she still would not have been satisfied. Her appetite was insatiable.

Dorian Gray

Inner Empire

This inner empire was something sacred.  Her words were dispatches from a foreign country.  The persona she presented to the world was it ambassador.  Everything seemed unstable and kaleidoscopic.  A rainbow on the edge of vision.  True communication was elusive.  She inhabited a tiny, barren island, surrounded  by a shark infested ocean.  She wanted to throw herself forward into the jaws of these ravenous sea creatures.  She wanted to be swallowed whole.  She wanted oblivion.  Dark blue nothingness like velvet against the skin

Euphoria

She composed odes to this newly acquired and unfamiliar euphoria.  She was a whirlwind rushing from one task to another.  Her senses were heightened, her wit quickened.  But the nights were endless.  In the darkest hours anxiety gripped her in its beak.  There was a bright light shining into her eyes.  It dazzled her like the headlights of a car on a dark country lane.  It would not permit her to sleep.  She could not escape from its clutches.

I cannot sleep even though my limbs are heavy with exhaustion.  I am taking thirty zopiclone a day and I’m still here.  My tolerance must be sky high. Maybe I should haver have left hospital.  Maybe I should stay there forever. The world is a monstrous place.

I went up onto the roof of the flats. I climbed out onto the ledge. I could feel the cold roughness of the bricks beneath my feet. But I couldn’t do it. I saw myself falling, falling, falling. Then I imagined my neck breaking and my spine snapping and I stepped back, berating myself for my cowardice. I just want to get out of this body. I want to be incorporeal. But there must be easier ways that don’t entail the risk of being permanently confined to a wheelchair.

Pills of Prussian Blue

They stuffed me full of multicoloured pills: coral, violet, Prussian blue and then they told me that I was ‘medication resistant’ and so they gave me more.  When I protested they called me ‘non-compliant’ and ‘unreasonable’.  They dulled the passing days.  I was beginning to see the attraction.  They lulled me into temporary oblivion.  They gave me a doped-up, saccharine view of the bleak region I inhabited.  It was an escape from the perpetually chaotic atmosphere of the ward, from the screaming and the shouting, from the fighting and the crying.  They made me forget, if only momentarily, that I existed without possibility of solitude in a transparent anteroom.  They called it permanent observation.  To me without the aid of medication it was hell on earth but I reflected that The Ward Attention Seeker had thrived on it. But I remained uneasy.  Each tablet drew me further into the backstreets of a world of declining aspirations and diminishing horizons.