Seven Years of Nectarine Slices

by Cassandra Luca

cw: disordered eating

There was no elevator to the art room on the fourth floor, so every morning I took the stairs. At the top, I would pause to clutch the railing, feeling as drained as if the whole day of running after campers had already passed by, as though it wasn’t only 8:30am.

There are many different kinds of exhaustion. The kind after a long red-eye flight, when I just want to lie down on fluorescently white hotel sheets and sink into the mattress before taking a shower. Or the kind following a long run. The middle-of-the-semester kind, when I’ve gotten used to sleeping three fewer hours than I actually need, forcing me to function like an old iPhone model: getting the job done, but taking twice as long to do it.

And then there was this, the walking-up-four-flights-of stairs kind, the fatigue so baked into me that I struggled to remember what energy was like, my limbs refusing to move, stuck in molasses. It pressed down on me like finely crushed layers of sedimentary rock. Feeling my battery drain with every Birkenstock-clad step forward scared me for the first time, and I knew that the exhaustion had spread to my brain, blurring my vision and slowing down sound.

I had been tired for a long time. I hadn’t been eating meals for a long time either, but I pretended the two weren’t connected.

•••

I once read that every emotion can be distilled into love or hate, but the truth is that this is a dumb saying since most of the time it really doesn’t matter which of the two is the root cause. Rather, it’s the ability to tell the difference between feelings that matters, like how being able to see that lime and chartreuse are actually two distinct colors. This is why guilt and shame have the destructive power of acid: hard to tell apart but still intertwined, they worked together to eat away everything they encountered.

Guilt told me to regret eating a slice of cake, and Shame ascribed a low moral value to who I was because I had eaten that cake. Of course, Fear soon walked in with a plan for the next day’s meal and exercise, but not before castigating me with visions of what I would look like in jeans two sizes bigger if I didn’t rein in my lack of self-control.

•••

How do I write about guilt and shame and fear, whom I first met when I was 13 years old and slowly realizing that my thighs jiggled when I walked, who told me that eating dessert was the equivalent of Eve’s own sin, and who taught me that simple addition of calories was the only kind of math that would actually be important in my adult life?

Someone with a PhD in psychology might tell me that the feeling of wanting to peel off my skin to undo the six cookies I’ve eaten at dinner, or the suspicion that throwing it all up would fix the issue at hand (despite being afraid of throwing up), or the need to plan three days of meals to stop my heart from racing, is a symptom of some deeply buried self-dislike, and that maybe we should unpack this. I don’t have a PhD in psychology, so maybe this is wrong, but the point is that my mind only truly stopped playing this game of whack-a-mole when I was asleep.

•••

When I graduated from high school, I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t looked at my body without wishing I was smaller. This is why I once spent an entire summer at camp exercising with a devotion bordering on the religious, and avoiding communal lunches so I could read Game of Thrones and eat one container of yogurt, one sliced nectarine, and two squares of chocolate.

Nectarine slices usually show traces of the pit; those fuzzy little tendrils are a reminder of the seed. I, on the other hand, cut my nectarines into chunks: rectangular prisms small enough to be thirds or fourths of what a healthy slice looks like. If it takes longer to eat, it’s almost like you’re eating more! Or so the logic goes.

At 15, I was intimately acquainted with both the kitchen and bedroom scale. The former used grams, which were far better than the terrifying imprecision of cups or ounces, and it was easy to do the math: 18 calories for 100g of tomatoes, 85 for 250g of cantaloupe. (I gained excellent skills in multiplication and proportionality. By comparison, I have not integrated anything by parts since the 2017 BC Calculus exam.) The numbers didn’t lie. The rule of thumb was that less would always be more, yet more of what I wasn’t quite certain. Regardless, that summer, I started wiping off excess olive oil from the frying pan before making scrambled eggs, leaving some to cook the eggs but not enough for the calories to count.

The bedroom scale conveniently told me my BMI and fat percentage. It became a race to the bottom to see whether I could decrease those numbers, or at least make them match: 18 seemed like a good target and those numbers led me to burn 831 calories the night of the annual high school freshman cruise. That night, I ate two bites of pizza before my friend, Guilt, slid into the plastic booth next to me while I was looking out the window at the harbor.

I had to gameify things—thanks, Duolingo, for introducing this word into my 21st century lexicon—because not doing so would remind me of how I would wake up and go to bed feeling ashamed, how I started to resent the girls around me who had no fat on their hips and thighs, and how it took birth control to restart my absent period.

When I was 18, I asked myself if I could I go one month without eating processed sugar. The answer was yes. It turns out I can also “live” without honey or chocolate, two foods that are equivalent to the nectar and ambrosia of Greek gods. If you would ask me about it now, I would tell you that I did it for my health, but the tiniest part of me, smaller than my nectarine slices, knows I did it to shrink myself before prom. On one hand, at the end of the month, my skin was the clearest it had ever been, but on the other, the end of May arrived and I still carried as much guilt around with me as I had before.

•••

The hypothetical psychology PhD might disagree with me, but unpacking the source of all this is less important to me than dealing with it and moving on with my life. The feeling I had throughout high school, of not being able to remember a moment of body neutrality, still lingers. Sometimes I count on my fingers, trying to think about how many years I’ve felt this way, and the number I always get is seven.

With college comes the perspective that while some things got worse—a near endless supply of food depending on the time of day, what the dining hall is serving, and whether I want to walk to Jefe’s, is still a calamitous, repetitive sensory overload two and a half years later—others got better, like the ability to ruminate on what will make me spiral (stress and lack of sleep) and what will bring me back to normal (time and patience). Checking HUDS menus in advance is part of an old habit that dies hard, as is calculating the return on investment on a cup of dulce de leche froyo. Answer: usually low, unless it’s midterm season, in which case the return models a graph of exponential decay.

I’ve discovered a fifth kind of exhaustion. It is not physical. It can’t be cured with sleep. It’s simply not wanting to feel like this anymore; a weariness with reality. I wore a twice-tailored red dress to prom; the back dips low to the base of my spine. Bought months in advance, it appeared to have its own glow in the photos that I later uploaded onto my computer. One of them clearly showed every single vertebra, but in the days afterward, all I could think about was how my arms weren’t thin enough, a sign that I hadn’t been at the gym often enough in the weeks leading up to a day that not only went well, but perfectly matched the way I had envisioned it. That’s rare, since big events always somehow go wrong.

Back then, I wished I had been smaller, and now I wish that I could look like I did that night, in that red dress with the crepe swishing around my ankles. A friend once told me that I looked radiant in the photographs I was showing her, and I wanted to cry because I knew she was right. And yet I continue to make the same mistake of carrying the weight of the nostalgia for a body that will somehow always be elusive.

My old journals are filled with tightly-packed handwriting. Closer inspection reveals self-castigation that borders on Catholic guilt. Too many cookies, not enough water, drink more coffee to feel full, space out my meals correctly, avoid dessert but not too often so as to not over-crave and binge. My journals have a lot of rules in them. I wonder how 40-year-old me will feel when she rereads what I’ve written now: I don’t want her to remember how much I disliked my body at 18, or how I spent years ashamed of cravings and my size, or how I wished starving myself came easier to me.

It’s been seven years, and I’m finally getting tired.