The Number Habit

Fifteen

Bitter.

That was a word to describe how I felt, an intensely bitter taste could be felt despite I had just eaten the numbers of the forbidden foods.

Despair.

It came upon me that in that short period of an hour I had eaten a giant packet of crisps - deep fried and 800+ calories, more than half a weeks worth of food - and glucose coated fructose - sickly strip and animal-based gelatine with esters pumped into vats. Rich, milky chocolate filled with an oozing sticky caramel, and then finally stuffing another entire packet of crisps without a drop of water even touching my lips.

A binge eat.

In desperation, in an impulse of loneliness and dread, I had wallowed in what I feared in most. Sugars and starch, monomers and polymers of calories. Numbers piling high above my head; their foul nature drowning out any sense of control I had in reality.

Days before I had strictly, rigidly, stayed true to my self-imposed rules. Now, I could feel my gut. The growling sensation in my stomach, pleasant, bearable and confidence-fuelling had ballooned into a mess. I was I intensely angry at myself, 'anger' the very word so simple but encompassing my absolute frustration and fear of what I had done. I could still feel the loquacious sensation ok the roof of my mouth. A cavern still smooth with the thick remains of butter-fat chocolate; throat still sickly sticky like mucus, cocoa ooze as I gagged on air.

In a panic, a trauma hit me.

I could never achieve anything.

Ballooning lines, numbers: n=x^2+50.8, the scale and its all telling, candid nature were something that I could understand. No-one could take the mathematics away from me, no-one could take away the laws of science that I obeyed, no-one could-