Edge Walking. Chap 8: Abyss Embrace
#8 of Edge Walking
"Edge Walking"
By: Cauldron O Boyfur
Notes and Warnings: This chapter is the first in the "Edge Walking" series which delves into the terror of the main character's life with bulimia. This is a crucial element to the "Edge Walking" series, so that is why it is so necessary to describe the multitude of emotions and feelings which are interwoven with bulimia. The chapter is basically comprised entirely of the accounts of a late night food binge, followed by self-induced vomiting. I urge those who may have eating disorders to exercise caution when reading this piece. I don't wish for this to trigger the same mannerisms in others (I wouldn't wish bulimia on my worst enemies). I always would like people to read my works unless it begins tinkering with their minds in a negative way, in which case, I'd urge you to discontinue reading. For those in the opposite end, unfamiliar with how overwhelming bulimia can be, trust me, the following portrayal of it is no exaggeration. The account given may be confusing to those who have never went through it. It's complex and filled with riddles and contradictions.
For those who do read, I urge you to comment. Opinions and suggestions of all factions are welcome, I would just like to know that the work which I put my heart and time into is actually being read by other people. I just wanna know that I'm not delving into painful issues like bulimia and religion for no reason, and that people are reading my stuff.
Chapter 8: Abyss Embrace
Character:
Jamie: 16 year old white bunny. Male.
No light is as brilliant or luminescent as that emanating from a fresh cracked refrigerator in the sullen veil of night. It was the light at the end of the tunnel, the exit ramp to a transcendental plane where heaven's rays and hell's trickery sprang forth. Dozens upon dozens of nights, Jamie had ventured into that golden aura which pierced through the darkest of new moon nights. Each time, the aftermath chiseled away another fragment of his friable love-for-self, which at this point was nearly disintegrated.
More than any other object, creature, chemical, or event, food was the most comforting companion in Jamie's life. Yet, it was always a rouse, a stab in the back, a betrayal of his willpower. And thus, food's unconditional friendship would unravel into shame's greatest henchman (Jamie, fully aware that shame, beyond both fear or despair, was the most hellacious of all emotions). Yet Jamie could never bereave himself from this conniving companion. It was not speed, or crack, or cutting, or being stuck in the doldrums of infinite depression, but bulimia which most haunted the bunny, turning any vestige of optimism into an ashen memory. All his other addictions just seemed almost impossible to overcome. Bulimia stood on a different level. It was no less than genuinely impossible to divorce himself from that abuser.
A peering into the lower quadrants of pandora's box and there it was. Sugar cookie dough. Smack! Bang! Jackpot! A whole hunk of it, shaped like a tube, about a foot long, sealed tight in virgin plastic. An antsy paw, like a ninja, snatched the pre-baked floury mixture, which Jamie judged to be perfect for nibbling on. Nibbling, not eating. He always wanted a little nibble, but wouldn't allow eating. At least, not without consequence.
"Only a taste. Just a taste." In restraint's name, Jamie actually whispered the order to himself, trying to keep composure. A part of him had already detracted from that, however. His love for food screamed, "Devour!", and so did the fidgety-pawed smacking of the tubular slab on the counter. Like most his age did with fetal pigs in a high school science classroom, Jamie sliced open the plastic skin. Yet he used no shred of meticulous grace in his bisection tactics. Just a quick knife rip, eager for content.
Holding a bear sized soup spoon like a shovel, Jamie dug in for that first gargantuan spoonful of beige gold.
Placing it in the oral cavity, texture was the first aspect registered by the senses. Smooth, but with the grainy grit of sugar specs, distinctive wholly unto sugar cookie dough, and a key reason he actually enjoyed it more than chocolate chip cookie dough. After a moment went by, sweetness unfurled on the tongue. Quickly following was taste. Taste.
Taste.
If anything in life indicated the indisputable existence of a God, it wasn't biblical-sized miracles, nor the individuals who orchestrated them. It wasn't drug induced revelation. It wasn't drugs. It wasn't the birth of a new child, nor the soft touch of a lover's paw under sheets of red velvet. It wasn't the beating hearts housed in the epicenter of every creature through which life flowed with amazing improbability. It wasn't life.
It was this: the taste of sugar cookie dough. Something so unequivocally wonderful lay beyond the realm of science. Nothing less than a supernatural deity could facilitate such esoteric euphoria. It was mythical. With taste, even the deaf could hear the accompanying crescendo of seraphim choirs which broke glass when YUMMY was tattooed into the brain.
More cheek-puffing spoonfuls were shoe-horned into Jamie's mouth. His mind was frantic in its pleading for moderation. But willpower couldn't corral or suppress hedonistic gluttony. A simple teenager, who loved food beyond life, could not just turn a cold shoulder to the sole means of achieving a morsel of heaven while alive. Insatiable cravings always overpowered.
The binge commenced.
Hammering down over half of the dough, a necessity for something new sent Jamie on an arctic scavenger hunt. He ventured into the freezer, in search of ice cream. Bounty was yielded in the version of mint chocolate chip, the peppermint white kind, which had originated in Phurrydelphia. Plunking the half gallon tub on the counter (next to the ransacked cookie glob), the night-shirted teen went for a mug. He had yet to let his toddler-underweared keister greet a seat.
Just a mug. Not a bowl, but a condensed coffee mug. It was all about restriction. He had to restrict, for the sake of not gaining weight (despite the medical community's deeming him as superceding the "clinically underweight" criteria). Just a mug. He needed to maintain his up-down-up-down ribcage. If not, he'd die of guilt. As it was, Jamie couldn't munch on much more, or he'd be forced to undo the toxic fat from himself through use of drastic measures.
The mondo-sized soup spoon was not the largest utensil of the outing to probe Jamie's dual-toothed mouth. Its size was eclipsed by the ice cream scoop. For every dip of dalmatian spotted, white and black chipped ice cream that went into the cup, about two were sucked unceremoniously off the scoop itself.
It disgusted Jamie how he ate. The act of eating was unsavory by nature, but his pigging out was a dishonor to anything relating to decency. Watching pieces fall from the dipper, where they quickly melted in droplets, and feeling sticky cream clumping the fur around his paw, and feeling the cold, viscid dairy dribble down his chin was nearly enough to make him want to eat an unpasteurized bullet.
After dishing out the chilled dessert, Jamie daintily placed the scoop on the sponge in the sink. This would ensure the slightest of noise generation. Though his eating was cyclonic in appearance, few sound waves muddled the air during the ordeal. Shame was the definition best suited to his feelings about binge eating. It was of the highest importance that besides he and God, nobody could be allowed exposure to the venomous avarice the lanky boy had for food.
Perhaps purging could have been bypassed if nothing beyond the ice cream was ingested. Whether that would or wouldn't have been the case had lost value when, halfway through the cup, Jamie began alternating bites between cold cream, and cool dough.
It was over. The sugar cookie dough, the mint chocolate chip, all hope to abstain from purge, it was all over. Now came the typhoon of thoughts, most unbearable. Visions of sedimentary fat layers piling up. Fat piling upon fat. Fat, a foreign aggressor which, in short time, would be galloping through the bloodstream, raping and ravaging any semblance of rule over his own body; in its stead, implementing and installing pudge. The world would come to know Jamie for being weak, uncivil, unhindered. Unholy, even. By this point, the sole method to dispel the usurping oil (before hitting the eternal bloodstream) was surrender. That did not equate to raising a white flag, but rather, lowering a white paw down the esophagus, where it would unfurl havoc until all impurities were expelled.
Now that it was over anyways, Jaime decided to indulge his addiction further. Swinging open the cupboard door which housed junk food, he softly withdrew a loud crinkling bag of BBQ potato chips. Perfect snack to fill the gaps which hadn't been experienced yet in the day.
Like many bulimics, the flavor combinations which Jamie ingested were considered unorthodox. Few would consider even the notion of following smooth, sweet, minty ice cream with crunchy, zesty, greasy, and salty BBQ chips without grimacing and losing appetite altogether. But he, as a bulimic, needed taste. Lots of it, and a wide variety of it. He jumped allegiance from sweet, to salty, to bitter, to sour, all in one sitting. He was a pirate, determined for the treasures of taste. Just as a pirate wouldn't dump emeralds overboard because rubies was on the mind, Jamie did not discriminate. He embraced. Love of food, and compulsive overeating had caused him to hunt down flavors beyond world's reach in dire need of molesting everything spectacular with his tongue. To mummify the world in it was the only chance that he could ever quell his vivacious hunger. To Jamie, it would be a slim chance at that, convinced that he'd then turn to slurping stardust like a dessert milkshake.
A few greasy handfuls, a licking of the paws, and it hit. His tummy had sent the message to the head, "Enough."
Bulimia Act 1: Binge, creating sin, which begets pleasure.
Bulimia Act 2: Guilt/toxicity synthesis. Shame's most potent version is harvested.
Now that the act 1 curtain had fallen, guilt's ramification kicked Jamie in the nuts of his brain. Now he was going nuts, hissing, "Oh fuck. You God damn pig. You fat fucking pig!" He wanted to scream and cry while simultaneously planting a big bunny foot through the window. "Stupid, stupid, what the hell were you thinking!? Just a little. It was just gonna be a little!"
He'd done it again
A few months prior, Jamie watched a documentary about a bear who raped, electrocuted, mutilated, tortured, and skinned bunnies. In the interview, to the surprise of most viewers, the hefty criminal claimed that he cried himself to sleep every night since his first kill, the guilt of his actions bombarding every aspect of his life. To this, the enamel reporter asked he continued killing, despite the feelings of shame and sin augmenting with each new victim. The bear's voice quivered during the reply, "I couldn't stop. I needed it. It was something beyond what life can give, and that's why I needed to do it. It destroyed my life in the process, but I needed it. I just couldn't stop." Despite being a pacifist, upon hearing that said, Jamie felt like a brethren to a serial killer. For Jamie as well fornicated with the selfish demon in himself, despite knowing it to be an unforgivable crime.
Now, in the kitchen of his new house, one more kill statistic had been tacked onto his rap sheet. Each time, he always made it a point to murder the same person. Himself. If cats are said to have nine lives, bulimic bunnies have at least dozens beyond that amount.
To binge eat was, for Jamie, to jump into brimstone pits of hell with anvils fettered to his ankles. Sinking, drowning in fat. It was at this point when he would take hold of his buoy. The purge. It was only through removing what had wrongfully been admitted to begin with, that Jamie could reassemble some of the broken shards of his fragile life. The internal terrorist which had threatened to literally blow up his midsection would achieve no such vile martyrdom. No, it was to be disarmed and sent into a septic exile.
Before his bowl of Trix that afternoon, Jamie had taken note of the second bathroom. Down the kitchen-basement stairs, straight on, into a closet sized bathroom, only a little more spacious than an airplane stall. Feeling the wall at the stair top like a drunkard fondling a stripper's thighs, the bump of an on/off switch was discernable. It was clicked on, for an eyelash of a second, just enough time to get a feel for the basement layout, then off. Nothing to impede the walk. All Jamie had to do was descend and walk on in. As he did just that, his right hand slide along the wall for balance and reference.
In the atonement chamber, the pantless boy knelt. Only nightshirt cotton divided his furred kneecaps from the concrete floor. Walls in the room were concrete as well. At the top of the wall (on the door's far side), the bottom of a 1x2 ft. widow (capping off adjacent to the ceiling) marked the spot where the ground of the outside patio lay. A slivered, silver crescent moon loomed in the sky's canopy.
Jamie's left arm was strewn as a fuzzy headreast from left to right at the gaping chair's center spot. Upon it, his forehead rested, looking earthbound in defeat. Without the aid of light, when looking into the toilet he only saw black.
If you stare into the abyss...
"God be with me." Four words. It had become tradition by that point. Jamie recited the same four word plea/prayer every single time he prepped for release. They would remain the final four words before minutes of gagging himself. Silencing himself.
Gag reflex was a distant memory. His throat had adjusted to the routine, it's tolerance to obstruction raised. It only made the job harder. Where he once used one finger on his paw, now three were summoned to go spelunking in Jamie's cavernous mouth. They entered. A minute and a half of fingers moving around like a concert pianist and at last, he was turning inside out.
The world exploded.
Ten minutes of volcanic exertion, now only stomach acid remained inside, carving it's liquid blades up the esophagus. There was no more to be unburdened. Jamie was, at last, sanctified. Free of shame's manacles. Left cheek lain atop cold porcelain, he was messy, drooling, sloppy, teary-eyed, wrapped in exhausted ecstasy.
Ugly caterpillars do ugly things in their cocoons to become beautiful butterflies. Nothing heavy can go airborne. Emerging from the bathroom's cocoon, Jamie was skinny. He was free to fly.
Lingering acids caused even the freshest, most meticulously rolled cigarettes to taste like spoiled grapefruit juice. Logic suggested to most, this should be a recipe for quick ashtray disposal in disgust. Strange enough, the post-purge cigarette exceeded the relief of nearly all other post-whatever cigarettes, including sex. Only those enjoyed after cutting into his bunny flesh, did Jamie find to be of superior caliber.