My Secret Family

Losing It

Max

89 kg and falling

I felt dizzy today, as in, really dizzy. I could not stand up for a few seconds and had to steady myself against my table when I did finally get out of bed. My legs buckled when I walked to the bathroom, not a very long distance at all but I felt exhausted from the exertion. I had to sit down to pee.

I drank water from the shower which revived me a little, then made myself a cup of sweet tea with extra sugar to fuel my brain. The brain runs on glucose, my biology teacher had told me, taking me aside one day to tell me all that was wrong with me, sugar is jet fuel for brains, you think too much and do too little.

I was up to 5 teaspoons now.

I did like the way I looked now, my stomach almost flat, girls noticing me on the street. But it would be a long time before I could adjust to this feeling that something fundamentally important in my life was missing.

It was Art class tonight and I would see her there, I would pluck up the courage and just ask her properly, dammit, I needed to stop being such a coward and just ask her. Rip it off like a plaster.Running into her at the mall right after a girl from art class had flirted with me in the art shop had unsettled me, because that never happened. Coupled with the dizziness and the nausea the meeting had felt like an invasion rather than a chance encounter. I had flirted back with the girl in the art shop and it felt like cheating, as if I was breaking something that had not even been connected.

I crumpled up the drawing in front of me, the lines wrong, the feeling not hiding there in the graphite but out in the open and exposed to the world in a place uncommon and uncomfortable.