Starving Me

A throwback for all my folks who didn't eat for a while there. This is a vision of that life, based on a university exercise to write in the present tense across a gulf of time.

The baby emerges and his parents argue about how to spell his name for forty-eight days before they choose to call him Jacob. The baby now-named Jacob has a shock of hair and eyebrows that also spell out surprise and horror. He is a chubby baby, so much so that people picking him up always make an exaggerated “oof” sound. Then, he is suddenly very skinny, the kind of pre-teen people stare at nervously in the street, wanting to ask him questions about his home life, worrying that his family are denying him key nutrients or keeping him locked in a kennel. They’re feeding him just fine, he tells no one in particular. He has precisely four friends, and then three, and then four again when Callie Harris decides to pull her girlfriend back into the fold and Jacob has to re-explain to his parents exactly what lesbianism is.

It is Callie’s girlfriend who first asks Jacob why he he only orders lemonade when they go out to eat, and the same girl who eventually suggests to him that he should perhaps think about eating something once in a while, anything really, and the same girl who eventually sits him down to say that unless he seeks help she’ll seek it for him. She says that someone could use his ribcage as a xylophone and she’s not even sure how to spell xylophone. He does not find that funny, and does not seek help, and instead gets very good at pretending to eat, pushing just the right number of peas around his plate, chewing the same piece of gristle for up to thirty-four seconds. After a while, the aforementioned “lessbeing” (as his mother pronounces it) does indeed betray him, and he is sent to a clinic where he is the only boy. The teenagers are not allowed to drink water in the hours preceding weigh-in in case they cheat. It takes some time to be set free.

At university two years later, he obsessively tracks his calorie intake in a spreadsheet quasi-ironically entitled “#swoleforthesummer”, and ends up uploading a series of ill-advised, semi-nude bodybuilding pictures to Facebook. Seventeen people comment something along the lines of “whoa / Beast Mode / big man alert”. These comments spark in Jacob a depressive episode characterized predominantly by a feeling of total disorientation, as if the whole world is swaddled by static. Bed-sheets wrap themselves around him. When he is reborn from his cocoon, he spends a whole day, or maybe just a few hours -- he can’t remember -- writing down a list of foods he actually likes. It is a hard thing to do.

Jacob does not go home for Christmas, and so it’s Easter before he sees his friends and family properly again, and he brings a foil-wrapped pile of pastries with him on the train, pastries he’s made himself, and he hopes they’re better than his practice batch, and he hopes that he is better too.

As the landscape flashes by, he sees his reflection morph and wobble, protean in the dirty windows. He is each and every age, all at once. Jacob sweats. He can smell the dough through its wrapping. When he gets home, he doesn’t eat even a single one, until late at night, when he slips downstairs in his slippers and stares at them, at their glistening icing. God: how that icing glistens.