1| Candy 

When you look at it from my perspective, the year becomes a ladder of one seasonal excuse to the next. Christmas to Valentine’s to Easter to the Fourth to Halloween to Christmas, in a loop, so if you buy enough you’re never without it. I stash it in dresser drawers and my work desk and the top shelves of cabinets out of my daughter’s reach. With my hands shaking, with anticipation as potent and absorbing as lust, I rip it free and swallow unhungry and compulsive and for all the wrong reasons. To counteract anxiety or depression or emotional pain, to numb out, to get through the day, for no reason at all. Chocolate and caramel and wafer and sweetness so extreme it hurts. I eat until I’m sick and then I eat through that. Lights off, TV on, wrappers piling on the bed next to me like a snow drift of foil paper plastic, shameful how much. I’m not even looking at what my hands bring to my mouth. It doesn’t matter. This is a source of backwards self-loathing pride. No one can take what I can take. Fifteen trick or treaters worth, a whole family’s Christmas stockings, an Easter egg hunt, a Valentine heart to no one and from no one, this is nothing like love. Eating isn’t eating. It’s medicine. It’s drugs. It melts on my tongue, embeds in my molars, the bliss and relief of it rolls down through me. Serotonin pathways wide open like hungry mouths. 

2| Cereal in the Middle of the Night

I don’t sleep much. I don’t eat well. I don’t self care. In the middle of the night, aching awake, anxiety like static all along my nerves, I need sugar and milk, something dense. After the divorce I’m living at my mother’s house with my four year old, in my high school bedroom. Home again, where I lived through my father before he killed himself, when he was drug addicted and violently unhappy and excruciating to be around. In this house where I was a child, I am lost in time. I pad through the dark in my pajamas in the middle of the night, hear the sound of my mother’s fan and noise machine and remember my father’s snoring and their restless unhappy sleeping, when they no longer wanted to be next to each other but still were. I am deeply familiar with this now, it’s an open wound inside me. By the light of the open refrigerator I pour cereal and carry it to the dining room table, sit in the dark, curl my arm around the bowl, auto-eat. And I feel him, I see him, my father waking from a twenty hour death coma after a comedown from meth or speed. He haunted the house in the middle of the night like a sleepwalker we lived in terror of waking up, always. I listened for him like someone in hiding or a girl kidnapped listening for captors. I feel myself in the same dark, at the same hour, eating the same food, same posture. Different pain, different source. Same response. I am my father’s daughter in my father’s house, and the feeling of life doubling over on itself like something in pain is a realization I don’t want to have. But, like so much else, there is no way out of it. 

3| Cuties in my Desk Drawer 

Two creative writing classes under my care in the big low income high school where I work, stocked with hand-picked kids whose teachers tell me they need something. An outlet, permission, attention, to be reached. Something to turn on the lights inside them. So I lean into it as carefully as I can. I listen and guide and teach them to trust themselves and the words they’re scared to say. And it comes naturally in the writing - at first halting and then gouting like blood - the pain their lives have dealt them. Hunger, neglect, mishandling, chemicals, cold, anger, indifference, all the ways we break and are broken. I intercede where I can and should, and keep respectful distance when I need to, and they learn over time that I’m always there, that I am safe, and that I will feed them. I buy bag after bag of cuties, stopping almost every day on the way to work, and empty them into the stash drawer which they raid shamelessly. Biting the peel open, splitting the sections down the seam, swallowing them almost whole. I also buy Legos and set them out on my desk and they attack them, build spaceships and houses and ziggurats that I will never have the heart to disassemble. Their fingers are sharp and sweet from the cuties, it’s on the Legos and their journals, on their pages scored deep with careful words in breakneck handwriting. They are so easily happy from these small things, cuties and Legos, they soar with it. It makes everything both worse and better because they are so childlike. 

4| Cheese Pizza

She calls it peese chizza. One of the last of her baby mispronunciations, along with rester-naut like astronaut. Peese chizza. I make no effort to correct her, she’ll figure it out. She’s four. We’re at the end of the era of her purely internal life, the world will seep in now and warp her in its own ways. Cheese pizza is what she always wants, so I fix it night after night, subpar oven pizzas with tasteless crusts and rubbery white cheese. I like them. I grew up on this kind of homogenized grocery store brand food, frozen garbage, salt and sugar and starch and fat. Sometimes I worry about feeding her so inauthentically but then I decide, from complicated threads of laziness and poverty and my own deep orbit into the patterns of how I was raised, details like that matter less than the fact that you’re feeding them, meeting a need, showing up. The first night in the new house after we could afford to leave my mom’s she said, Mama you MADE this house for us? You looked and looked and found the perfect house for us and then you MADE it? And I took credit for that, single mom, fresh stinging wounded everywhere still from everything in my life, yes: I made this house. I made this peese chizza. I made it, or I’m trying to. We sit on the couch and eat it together and the TV is on but our legs are touching, always. 

5| Hospital Pancakes

My aunt was old, but not that old, not old enough that any of us expected her to die. It was a decision she made. A conscious decision in response to the debilitation and loss of independence that the stroke dealt her to stop eating, starve herself out. Slow and agonizing, but she held the reins until the end just like she always had. It wasn’t easy for anyone to come around to. She seemed okay, the therapists and doctors had hope. Physical therapy and scans and tests and rechecks. And tray after tray of hospital food set in front of her, congealing and beading up under the plastic plate covers, then removed by nurses whose wrists bent in surprise at the weight of uneaten food. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, delivered and removed untouched. The one concession I saw her make in those months as she winnowed away before our eyes, sinking into herself, growing quieter until you just pretended you could understand her words to appease her because it didn’t matter anymore anyway, was a bite of hospital pancakes. It was for my mother. Don’t these look good? my mother said, and they did, browned at the center and light at the edges and sopped with syrup and butter - they did, unless you were bent on the pursuit of death. My aunt nodded faintly, then, maybe out of exhaustion, lifted the fork slowly with her stroke affected hand and guided it into her mouth. Chewed forever. Swallowed with difficulty. In the car on the way home my mother said, That was good, wasn’t it? Daylight whipping past the windows, the speed of the world spinning relentless. I saw my aunt in the false light and underwater shadow of the hospital room, breathing slowly in the endless hush, turned aggressively inward. I imagined what it had taken to fight through the hunger to reach the point where she could deny it, and wondered how badly that one bite must have reignited everything. And she did that for love. We need to let her go, I said. So we did. 

6| Birthday Dinner Purge

Dinner with the family at the restaurant of my choice. Nothing is wrong. Everything is wrong. Everything is fine. Everything is off. It’s inside you. Outwardly you are okay and you look okay and you interact like everyone else and inwardly you are a puzzle jammed together senselessly. There aren’t words for it, this silent anxiety and the deep deep bruise of limitless depression, the way that nothing has to be wrong for everything to feel wrong. Food numbs it. You auto-eat chips, flour tortillas rolled with butter and salt, beef enchiladas orange with grease and yellow cheese and it melts down the center of you hot and oily and dense, filling you with the temporary balm of taste and weight. The ritual of chewing swallowing chewing swallowing, a loop, smooth and soothing as a swimmer turning their sleek head in and out of the water to breathe. This is your breathing. Food numbs it. Until it doesn’t. Plate empty, so fast the edges are still hot from the waiter’s warning, hot plate hot plate. You are a tick sucked full of meat and cheese and bread and lard. Your body rises to the surface of your consciousness like a corpse bubbling up from a lake. Your stomach cut in half by jeans, rolls of flesh bulging above and below the waistband, thighs spread grotesque on the chair and the denim on the inside rubbed pilled worn down to almost nothing from friction. Your upper arms thicks as hams. The roll of fat under your chin. You are bursting, bulging, quivering with it, you are viscerally disgusting, and it is wrong to expect the world to allow your existence this way. So you excuse yourself to the bathroom. This place has single occupancy bathrooms. One of the reasons you like it. Everyone still eating, they hardly skip a beat when you leave. Then you are kneeling with your knees braced against the porcelain bowl, the way you do it, with your finger in your throat at the right angle, it’s like sex, knowing exactly where and how to trigger, and you release it above the water line so there’s no splash. Empty yourself. The relief, it rolls through you, along your nerves. The beauty of reversing time. So good that it is worth facing this — what you are willing to do to appease your sickness and vanity and your abusive relationship with control. You are kneeling in a public bathroom at a restaurant, your face hovering above a public toilet where the unfathomable world has been, throwing up the dinner your mother bought for you. This is the depth of your self-hatred and narcissism and brokenness. This is who you are. This is your birthday. Another year and you somehow manage to keep not outgrowing this.  

7| Feeding the Hungry Student 

The student no one feeds, junkie parents, he got to be seventeen on little more than his wits and dollar menu drive through garbage every few days or so. So I figure it out, start slow with peanut butter crackers and bananas and water bottles. Like an abused animal, coaxing him closer. Then lunch every day despite the free cafeteria food, he’s bottomless, can eat forever, and really it’s about the daily touch-base of it - I care about you, I fold you into my life this way. Deli meat, wheat bread, tomato, lettuce, all in separate bags so it doesn’t get soggy. It’s the little things. Fresh fruit, baby carrots, snap peas. He can’t eat enough fresh food, like he’s purging out all the unclean. Then sometimes I bring him dinner at home or wherever, really there is no home, if he texts me, if he gets hungry enough. Lonely enough. Then sometimes once I start buying his school clothes and shoes and haircuts, lunch out with my little daughter who loves him and accepts him like he’s ours. I watch him across the table, ask about his classes, bother and nag and joke with him in a normal way the way no one does. His neck is skinny. He’s forking up spaghetti and meatballs like someone might take it from him. I say, You look so thin, what’s going on? He says, of where he’s crashing, I try not to eat much, I don’t want to be a burden. Those words sink into me slow and ache like a bruise, all the things I can’t fix, all the hungers I can’t feed, all the wounds I can’t get to. When that kind of thing comes to light I go through a phase of trying to pull him in a little further, text him a little more, probe a little deeper, but abused animals will only let you so close. 

8| Eating in Bed 

So I left my marriage and you left yours and among the nerved up mess of that, we were finally allowed to stop pretending the current between us wasn’t what it is. We hole up in my house like refugees and cling like teenagers and eat in my bed in pajamas by the light of Netflix, everything that occurs to us. Feeding something deeper than hunger, both of us with our compulsive need-shaky addict bloodlines, chicken fried rice, pie straight from the tin, fresh cut grocery store fruit, oven pizza, cheese and Triscuits, cereal, avocado with a spoon, Reese’s Pieces, potato chips from Central Market that melt like butter on the tongue. Salt in the sheets we have to brush out like sand or sleep on and it sticks to our sweaty skin so we become edible. If I could eat you alive I would. I try for it. Taking bites out of your body like an apple so you’re marked deep enough to feel me from the inside when you’re out in the world. Love like starvation, like binge appetite. I feed you a Sour Patch Kid off the end of my thumb and your chest is scattered with sugar I would snort like cocaine if I could cut it into lines. I feed you my thumb and my skin and myself and watch your eyes bliss out half-lidded in the dark of my room. Your mouth tastes like the relief of food we’re so desperate for now that each of us separately within our lives and together can breathe again, taste again, the coursing relief of being alive again. 

9| Nothing 

Sometimes I still can. In high school I had nerves of steel. The way I can take in endless quantities now, back then I was the negative of it, I could go forever with nothing. You get high on the hunger. The hunger becomes food, your stomach eating itself, the sweet agony of it. Emptiness is the ultimate purity, a clean slate, you are light and unspoiled, a better ghost of yourself. The redemption of that is hypnotic. So decades later, sometimes I still can, if there’s a catalyst in my life like teaching hard or parent conference night, absorbing work that catches me up and I check the clock and I’ve had nothing all day and the accomplishment of that sweeps down through me, a swift current of power. I’m in control. Sometimes writing does it. I get sucked into the world I’ve created and fall down that rabbit hole and lose hours, and when I come up I’ve got pages done and a hole in the center of me. Those moments, they are precious. They let me love myself, however temporarily. For a second I’m worthwhile. For a second I deserve to inhabit my body.

10| Fourth of July

Every year: fried chicken, honey butter biscuits, mashed potatoes, moisture beading up in the cardboard box, making everything soggy.  Those little double barrel salt packets with the salt so fine you can’t see it. Diet cream soda and diet root beer aching cold from the cooler sloshing with melted ice. The grocery store Lofthouse cookies with a layer of neon frosting half an inch thick on the circle of white dough, the elemental sweetness of something raw. We do this for my mother mainly, my sister and I now adults and unimpressed by fireworks, annoyed at the traffic in and out of the park, the mosquitos and the Texas heat, the uncomfortable ground under the blanket, the crowds. But she loves it, and my four year old daughter loves everything, so we go, and we immerse in the ritual of tradition expressed through food. The way it’s a marker — you’ve lived through another year of everything and made it to this point again, and for a moment you are all just holding still together. Three generations. The sun sets, the sky goes lavender and orange. My daughter veers too close to the edge of the man-made lagoon and I decide not to yell. There’s still time, no fireworks until all the light has died. We count the biscuits, make sure it’s equal, count the cookies. Count the minutes at first but then relax and forget. My sister stretches out on her back with her eyes closed. I am bound to remain upright, watching my daughter dart like a minnow and risk falling. My mouth tastes like salt and frosting and the half light softens everything, and for this moment somehow in spite of it all, I am soothed. I am content.  

Chelsea is the author of the Little Fiction story, War Dolls. And though she’s relatively new to writing nonfiction, you’d never guess it. There’s a bravery and honesty there (and in her fiction, too) that jumps off the page and grabs you right by the feels. All of them. All of those feels.