A NICOTINE PATCH ON A FIBROMYALGIA RASH

The bath curtain had a brown mildew tint, and the bath itself was a duck yellow. I stripped off and stood in. The water was hard and unforgiving as it hit my back, and the tea-tree smell of the soap was making my eyes water. I rubbed the minty gel on my eyes to see if it would sting, but it must have been made with this in mind because it didn’t hurt at all. I splattered shave cream all over my body and hacked against my skin with a cheap razor. I bent over and made odd shapes trying to shave my hairy arse, but I ended up making it look all patchy and like a clown’s haircut. Afterwards, I dried myself down and dressed inside the toilet. This wasn’t my house after all.

 I had been living with a Venezuelan couple in their late 80s on Madison Street in Brooklyn. I moved to New York on a whim in late 2023 to try and find myself. Carlos was a pointy little man who put baby powder on his dick every night, explaining the dust on the toilet rim. I’d put money on the shit stains being his too. He whistled around the house like an openly gay prison warden looking for ass. He watched me cook and told me stories of when he was a gunner in the war. He said it was the perfect role because from all the way up in the sky, it was impossible to tell if he killed anyone or not. His eyes filled with blood as he held his hands together and rapped out ‘pew-pew-pew’.

Maria, the poor woman who had to take care of this wiry little man, was a retired university professor who rarely stepped foot outside their room. She watched a lot of telenovelas on full volume, the sounds of overly acted arguments and cunty sad piano ballads always filling the house. When I did see her, she was always ill-stricken and looked very near death’s door. But truth be told, they looked after me, and we became a kind of fucked up family.

New York was the height of my eating disorder, and it started to really take a toll on me physically. I had suffered the mental effects for a while before this, but the physical tiredness, my bones touching, my breath being short, and my stomach unable to break down food, meaning I ended up with chunks coming up as baby vomits, were all new additions.

Early-stage eating disorders are hard to notice at first; you understand that something is wrong, but you don’t expect it to keep getting worse. At first, you just don’t eat as much as you did, but not enough for anyone to notice. You’ll stop having two biscuits with your tea and only have one. You know you’re making your stomach smaller, and that means you won’t be as hungry, and therefore you’ll get skinny. But it doesn’t feel like a bad thing until you notice it.

But eventually, it catches up with you. I went days without eating a substantial meal, drinking black coffee whenever I could to fill me up. I lived off jelly sweets, pasta with no sauce, and a croissant. Eating disorders are funny because they allow you to feel okay with eating some things and make you feel sick to your stomach eating other things. I could eat sweets and pastries, and for some reason, it wouldn’t get to me, but I couldn’t stomach real food. People started to notice, and so I decided to tell people I was a vegetarian. That would buy me some time to keep it hidden. Meanwhile, my clothes started to hang loose off my body, and the bones of my ribcage started to pop out. I would eat meals and purge them back up, and I wasn’t getting better. Something had to change, and quickly. I was losing all my energy, and I desperately needed help.

My sister and I were forced to drink health-kick smoothies every morning before school. Let’s be honest: that works great for two kids with early-stage eating disorders. I remember getting together as a family to watch VHS tapes of Billy Blanks’ revolutionary Tae-Bo workouts from the 90s. We would work out with my dad in the sitting room every day, and he would get us to do the splits against the corners of the room. He would push one of the dining room chairs up against my thighs and force the stretch as much as it could go.

         “Turn around, don’t let me see the tears,” he would yell.

I faced the back wall, and I cried so much I wet the collar of my t-shirt. My sister was always stronger than me. I wiped the tears quickly with my sleeves, and I joined back in. My sister looked at the drips of tears in my eyes, and the wet of my collar. And I remember feeling like such a disappointment.

My dad was hard on me, but he taught me how to be strong. At the time he didn’t know how badly I would need that strength, and how often my thick skin would come to save me. My dad made me a scrapper. He taught me how to bite, and how to draw blood.

         “Did you forget about me?,” my willy interrupts.

         “Not everything is about you,”I say.

Everyone’s eating disorder can be different, but for me, I knew I was skinny, and being skinny made me feel desired, and it made me sexy. And to eat would be to lose all that magic. I was treating myself like an underage model in line to sleep with DiCaprio. He’d only have me if my belly looked like the curve of the letter C. Heave into me, Leo; you can take everything.

My eating disorder made me feel like I was winning at something for once, and that was really fucking nice.

In another life, my dad would have looked at me and said, ‘It’s okay to cry’ and maybe I would’ve told people sooner that I was sick. But he didn’t say that. I sometimes wonder if things would’ve been different. Or are our lives set out like storybooks, and either way, no matter what, even if the chapters are mixed up, eventually we end up on the same path, like that’s what’s meant to happen to us.

 I took the E train uptown to Queens. It was 11 pm, and the train car was loud and reminded me of a party bus. New Yorkers were always one inch away from getting into a fight. I was on my way to meet someone from a hook-up app. When I arrived at her place, it was dark, and the streets were busy. Food trucks were grilling burgers and dogs, and older women were dancing at the intersections. The energy was palpable and delicious. It made me perk up and want to join in with the festivities. That’s the beauty of New York; every day is a fireworks display of people who, despite their hardships, can’t help but smile and dance together. There’s a real sense of community, unlike anything I’ve known before.

Her building was huge, and it reminded me of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining. We climbed four flights of stairs, and she invited me inside. Her place was homely and cute, and she had a year-round Christmas tree in the corner of the living room.

         “We keep it up all year,” she pointed at it.

She poured me a glass of water from her fancy Brita Filter, and I slugged it back, not knowing how thirsty I had gotten. She lured me into her room and showed me around. She had stuffed bears on the bed, and she made sure to tell me all of their names. She took off her top and leaned back against Henry the Teddy Bear’s head. She had pure white skin that seemed to almost sparkle in the bright light. She slipped off her pants, and she tugged at my neck and pushed me down, and between her knees. My heart started to race. Things were moving too fast, but I didn’t want to disappoint. I tried asking if we could slow down, but she just ignored me. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and her hands were forcing heavily on the back of my head. I was. unable to move and my breath became short. I pushed against the weight of her fingers, and I sat on the edge of her bed in silence.

She put her top back on and said that I should go and that she had work she had to do. I wanted to tell her how she made me feel and how she had forced me down on her. I put on my shoes, and I left without telling her any of that. On the train home, I cried, pushing my head between my knees so nobody would see.

The nicotine patch that I had been holding down was peeling off, and underneath, my fibromyalgia rash was getting worse. I was covered in tears, and my belly was rumbling. So I did what any normal person would do in that situation. I walked for 4 hours on an empty stomach in the middle of a panic attack, and afterwards, I took a train home and forced myself to get sick into the toilet. I heaved out the acid lining of my emptied stomach. And look, it would be fun to lie, but this was my life, and it’s important that I tell ya that.

Carlos insisted that he would cook a traditional Venezuelan feast tonight and that I had to join them! Their kids had travelled from Ohio, and he was excited to introduce me. I hadn’t had a real dinner with people like that in months, and so it made me nervous, but I said I would. Maybe it would be nice. He made Arepas, which were corn flour baps with ground beef and beans inside, but he made some with fish too, as he knew I didn’t eat meat. He made Guarapo, which was a sugarcane drink, which was very sweet but delicious. And we all sat down and said prayers and shared stories and food. It was nice, and for the first time in ages, I forgot about the eating disorder, and I just enjoyed the tastes of what I was eating. They all cheered for my success in the city and said that I would do great things, and I really felt welcomed and loved. Looking around the table that night, I realised how much I missed home, and I acknowledged that I had an illness that I needed to get on top of before it destroyed me.

I took another bite of my food, knowing full well that I’d make myself get sick that evening.