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Ward 37

I sit with my back to the scales. I sit in a wheelchair because that’s how the scales are designed, but also because I’m not allowed to see the number. I sit here because I’m starving myself, or as the nurses and doctors say, because I suffer from anorexia.

              “Ok, sugar,” the nurse says. She says it kindly; the word ‘sugar’ used as a term of endearment, but just the mention of the stuff makes my body fizz with panic. It’s not that dissimilar of a feeling to the sugar rush I used to get as a child when I ate too many sweets at the school disco, although my body had the energy to get excited then. It doesn’t now. And it’s not excitement I feel at the reference to sugar. It’s fear. Fear that I might get force fed – or worse, greedily consume – something containing that fattening, indulgent substance. The little crystals disguised as pleasure would pop and poison my blood, no longer sweet but sickly, infecting my body with even more inadequacy. It flows through my veins, this lack of self-worth. Carbohydrates replaced with compulsions, fats replaced with phobias, proteins replaced with pity. I seek to control it, to control everything, but they argue the more I try to control, the more my control slips away. 

              “Let’s go back through to the ward.” I get weighed every two days, but that’s long enough for me to notice the deterioration. My legs feel weaker as I experiment with the idea of standing. They look smaller – bonier and lighter and starved – as I shift my weight. My spine pushes further into the back of the wheelchair, another layer of muscle having disintegrated since my last meeting with the scale. Moreso, I just can’t be bothered. I feel so tired. I visualise the journey I need to take as if I’m about to climb a mountain. I can walk the short route to Ward 37, around eighteen steps, or the long route, around twenty-two. I doubt anyone else even knows they’re different distances, but that’s me isn’t it. Obsessive and compulsive and disordered. 

              I want to take the short route. This has already been too draining of a venture, and I want to sleep in my bed, but I’m a slave to the parasite that lives with in me; the haunting, nagging voice that tells me I’m more worthy if I take the longer route. It means I’m more deserving. Less lazy. More determined. I know it means none of these things, but I also know I haven’t the strength to disagree. 

              As I stand and turn to begin my laborious trek, I notice my path is obscured. A lady sits in a wheelchair in the middle of the corridor. She is terribly thin. She looks old, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t. Her face is gaunt and her limbs so slender her head and hands look oversized. I don’t need to know anymore. I can tell she suffers like me. 

              “I can’t walk anymore. My bones are breaking. Isn’t that what the doctor said?”

              “You’ve got osteoporosis in your bones, yes, but Dr Patel really is keen for you to get weighed today. And you did go for a little walk on your own this morning.”

              “Yes, but I had to go for that walk.”

              “Why?” The woman shakes her head hysterically.

              “You don’t understand.”

              “I’ll help raise you out of this chair and into that one.”

              “There’s no point if I can’t see the number anyway. And I know I’ve got fatter. I can feel it.”

              “I don’t think you have, sweetie.”

              “There’s no point,” she says, distressed. “I’m going to die anyway. I’ve had this thing since I was her age. It’s stayed with me my whole life. I’ve never been able to have a job, or go on holiday, or have children. The only friend I’ve got is this illness, and it wants me dead.”

              I think back to my own days at school. They feel so long ago now, and it seems crazy to imagine that my classmates are all still there. If I wasn’t in hospital, I would be there now. I would be sat learning about algebra and poetry and the War of the Roses. I didn’t mind school. I preferred it the hospital. I enjoyed learning things, and I always did quite well in exams. I should be sitting my GCSE’s this year, but that feels like somebody else’s dream right now. I almost laugh to myself. I can’t imagine many sixteen-year-olds ‘dreaming’ of sitting their exams, but hospital does that to you. It makes you crave the ordinary. I miss being able to sit in a park and feel the wind blow against my face. I miss that feeling of having a warm sun hug your back on a cold day. I miss being able to collapse on the sofa after a day at school and think ‘Oh, I’m so glad to be home.’ Those little things have all been taken from me, now I’m here. 

              I know they had gone long before I got pushed onto Ward 37. I lost the ability to simply ‘sit’ in the park. If I was in the park, I had to be running laps of it, to burn off the calories. No matter how bright the sun, Mother Nature lost the ability to warm my body. I was constantly freezing, even on the warmest of days. My body got ever thinner, disguised by a veil of delusion, to the point that no number of layers was going to warm me up. I collapsed every day after school, but not on to the sofa. I didn’t think ‘Oh, I’m so glad to be home.’ I collapsed out of exhaustion, my legs too weak to support me any longer, my body unable to walk another step. I thought ‘I want this to end,’ and I didn’t care how. I just needed closure. I tried everything to free myself from the niggling devil on my shoulder, telling me that the only life I could live was one of starvation. 

              I don’t know why it started. Counsellors always seem keen to pick up on the fact I’ve never had many close friends, but I’m keen to skirt over that fact. I haven’t minded living life mostly on my own. I never had any expectations that someone would sit next to me in class, or that I’d have people to go to lunch with. I never got invited to birthday parties, and my name never got put in the hat for Secret Santa, but that didn’t bother me. I was more of the studious type. I was content reading a book on a bench. And then I was content running. And then I was content, briefly, having the niggling devil on my shoulder for company. And then I ended up here, and I realised I am not content at all anymore. 

              I forget I have been staring at the woman in the wheelchair, so I turn away. I sit back down. I feel dizzy, and not from the moving. I feel I was staring into my future, and it was a future I do not like. 

              I look the other way, down the shorter route. A mother stands feeding her baby. Her body is plumper than mine, but I guess that’s not saying much. Her arms aren’t toned and sculpted, her stomach looks more padded than trim. But the real difference between me and her is in our faces. Her eyes radiate contentment and peacefulness, not fear and despair. Her body is satisfied and her mind more so, both thriving off the birthday meals out and picnics in the park, the kinds of occasions I have long since avoided. She probably has memories of family and friends and her beautiful baby, not lonely ones of these bare walls.

              I had that once. My life was once full, with nice things, not just with illness. Despite the loneliness which feels the most chronic of all my pains, my life has had moments of real light. I remember family picnics on the beach, where we would sit for hours and play games and my cousins and I would cheat but the adults would let us because we were just kids. We’d have barbeques and the offerings would either be raw or burnt but we’d eat happily all the same. We’d stay on the beach all day long, soaking up the sun like sponges, letting it tan our skin. My tans gone now, but the memories stay. Those times haven’t left a mark on my skin, but a forever one on my heart. 

              I remember when my aunty had her baby. It wasn’t that long ago, a couple of years, maybe. I was old enough to appreciate the wholesomeness of welcoming a little one into the world. I can remember playing with him on the carpet, pushing a wooden train under the sofa and out the other side, and thinking to myself ‘I cannot wait to have children.’ My aunty said it to me too, as we left that time - ‘One day, you’ll be an excellent mum.’ The devil on my shoulder replaces that future child. It steals all chances of me finding my own pure joy, playing with my own baby on the floor of a house which maybe I might be able to call my own. Watching the woman in the corridor, I feel her past is fuller than my future; her future brighter than mine.

              I look back in the other direction, but the woman in the wheelchair has gone. So has the nurse. All that’s left is a flickering light. I spin, with vigour, to look back at the woman and baby, but they too have gone, if they were ever there at all. 

              “Are you ready to make a move, honey?”

              I begin to stand, slowly. 

              “Come on, sweetie, which way are you going?”

              I stand and I wonder. I wonder what this tiny, seemingly insignificant decision could mean for my future. I stand at the corner of the hospital corridor, debating crosswords and consequences, envisaging life and death and a life not worth living. I don’t want to suffer. It isn’t my fault I’m broken, but it is my responsibility to get fixed. 

              My body feels magnetised to the longer path, drawn to it by a force only I can feel. But I can pull away. I pull away and I take my first steps to freedom, and I wonder what that future version of me looks like.