Chiseled

I started with a bag of nacho cheese Doritos and a 2-liter of generic pop. I can’t remember if we called it pop or soda, but I do remember I’d just finished Basic Training. During those six weeks at Lackland, I lived on dry chicken and stiff mashed potatoes, most likely rehydrated flour and paste and not potatoes at all. The purge came easy, too easy. I bent over, thought about some man, vomitted. No inducing necessary. I thought, Kinda normal. Kinda natural.

At some point, I bought a scale and weighing below 120 became my non-military mission. When my weight rose, say to 121, I bought a box of Correctol from the Base Exchange, gulped three tablets and, within a few hours, I shat water. By morning my cheekbones chiseled and eyes hallowed and I noted my brow bone. My shadow dipped, curving into new territory—luscious, sultry.

Like all addictions, one hit pivots into two, then 20, then too many to count. My binges grew into buffets, increasing with two, sometimes three bags of groceries. Who knew the stomach could distend that far? Who knew it could return? I’d retch until my stomach cramped and curiously, I maintained a six-pack—Puke-crunches, I called it—and my new weight mission shifted; 110.

Within a few months, those three pink tablets no longer depleted my face into the dehydrated look I learned to love. I found myself gulping an entire box, 24 tablets, the pink-chalk coating offering a pre-gag. My supervisors witnessed my gorge, witnessed my wasting too. They thought me anxious. Thought me dying. They failed to intervene. In the military, you do not break or crack or shatter, but you can shrink. I remained fake-whole and boned.

One time, after my binge and my purge and my box of laxatives, my body couldn’t quit. Would not stop its emptying. My kidneys did. Quit. Renal failure, they called it. I weighed 100 lbs. I stood before my full-length, rubbing my palms over my jutting hips, twirling, slow and model like, to glance at my back ribs. I slipped jeans—size zero—without unfastening. Still, my body held inches I could pinch. I found a new mission: Below 100.

My heart palpitated. Potassium deficiency, they called it. Later, much later, I’ll think about the way starvation offers more than a sense of control or feeling of thinness. It gifts an eternal longing to die. A slow and tedious path to suicide, one less morsel at a time. Food settling on your tongue or stuck in your bowels seems an invasion and, in my moments of small satiation or minor fullness, memoires of raids and intrusions, men infiltrating my child-body, my woman-body filled me more. So I grew too thin and fragile for them—all of them—to notice me, to see what was left of me.

Perhaps this illness is simply an act of disappearance, one’s fight for invisibility, Self-preservation through the art of emaciation, I call it. And it worked. It really worked. Except for my heart and kidneys.

 

Rebecca Evans is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet who writes the difficult, the heart-full, the guidebooks for survivors. Her debut memoir in verse, Tangled by Blood, bridges motherhood and betrayal, untangling wounds and restorying what it means to be a mother. She’s a memoirist, essayist, and poet, infusing her love of empowerment with craft. She teaches high school teens in the Juvie system through journaling and visual art. Rebecca is also a disabled veteran and shares space with four Newfoundlands and her sons.

She co-hosts Radio Boise’s Writer to Writer show on Stray theater and does her best writing in a hidden cove beneath her stairway.
Her poems and essays have appeared in Brevity, Narratively, The Rumpus, Hypertext Magazine, War, Literature & the Arts, The Limberlost Review, and more, along with a handful of anthologies.

She’s earned two MFAs, one in creative nonfiction, the other in poetry, University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. She’s co-edited an anthology of poems, When There Are Nine, a tribute to the life and achievements of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Moon Tide Press, 2022). Along with her full-length poetry collection, Tangled by Blood (Moon Tide Press. 2023), she has a collection-length poem, Safe Handling, (Moon Tide Press, 2024) available