Hand Over the Scissors

The girls sat at the table nearest ours.  Actually, they were women, or almost women, but that was something I discovered only after I got to know one of them.  Until then I had no idea that their illness had trapped their adult selves inside the bodies of lost little girls.

At 21 years old I didn’t understand my own issues, let alone anyone else’s.  The various groups in residence never mixed, except during the odd sanctioned event designed to cheer us up.  Three times a day we just shuffled past each other into the cafeteria, our eyes fixed firmly ahead of us.  No one suddenly leapt from their group’s designated table and dashed across the room, shouting, “FREEDOM!” as they crashed through the invisible barriers separating us.  We didn’t want to know each other.  We didn’t even want to know ourselves.

The cafeteria still managed to be a somewhat cheerful place despite the palpable misery its diners inflicted upon each other.  Light streamed in through large windows, and someone had thought to paint the walls in bright spring colors, providing a kind of warmth we could no longer generate on our own.  Considerable effort had gone into the food as well.  It was nothing fancy, but we got enough and it tasted good.  I actually sort of enjoyed mealtime.  It provided a fleeting break from the non-stop horror show taking place upstairs in our designated corner of the building.

For the girls at the table nearest ours, though, each confrontation with food took on the aspect of death .  The rules of their unit required that they eat a certain amount.  Given that I gladly and willingly polished off every morsel on my tray it never occurred to me that for the thin girls sitting a few feet away, eating constituted a kind of mental violence imposed on them for their own good.  This was partly because the girls currently in residence were hardened combat veterans; they’d reached a grim detente with their food.  None of them seemed exactly happy at mealtime, but neither did they let on just how difficult chewing and swallowing could be.

And then the new girl showed up.

Like the others, she looked young.  Too young.   Ghost-white, swimming in her clothes, and with limp black hair scraped back into a high ponytail, she viewed the cafeteria scene with dark terrified eyes that were too large for her gaunt face.  A woman wearing a sympathetic smile set a tray in front of her.  As the new girl gazed down at the food, teardrops began rolling down her cheeks.  The woman took her hand and held it.  I watched the girl wrestle with something terrible inside of her before I lowered my eyes, embarrassed by my interest. 

Everyone in the cafeteria had problems that felt like a knife against the jugular.  The alcoholics, the drug addicts, the women in my group who recoiled from our own histories—we all bled.  And yet watching the skeletal girl struggle to bring even a forkful of food to her mouth, I experienced a kind of grief for her that I could never quite manage for myself.  The most basic of requirements had become her enemy.  During a joint outing one of the viciously skinny girls who turned out to be 23 years old told me she’d stopped eating to wrest back control of her life.  Except that in the end, the cure for a lifetime of pain had become a potentially fatal condition in its own right.  Irony could feel like the worst kind of practical joke sometimes.

I understood this because I, too, had just declared war on my own “coping mechanism.”  Which was why I found myself somewhere with pristine green lawns and a so-called trust course and the rule that no one could have any sharp objects in their room.   We had all come to this place technically out of choice, but the distinction between us and those in a psych ward was a fine one.   If you wanted to shave your armpits, you still had to go to the nurse’s station, ask for your razor, and proceed under the nurse’s watchful eye.  Just like how a nurse had to check on you every 15 minutes all day long, to make sure you hadn’t hanged yourself with a bed sheet, or god knows what.  Suicide threats had that effect on the staff.

It was the last chance saloon for those of us on the verge of giving up.   We did our time and went home again, a few of the massive holes in our internal fabric partially mended, most of the others still gaping.  The trick was to either learn how to live with these holes, or to find a way to stitch them up ourselves.   To hope we could pull that off sometimes seemed absurd when we were surrounded by so much agony, but every small breakthrough personally experienced or witnessed in another extended the possibility. 

By the time I checked out of the treatment center, the girl with the high ponytail could eat without the nurse holding her hand.  But these types of wars are never really won.  The best one can hope for is fewer engagements of a less brutal kind.  Although I never knew what happened to her I have to believe the girl is still fighting—that 25 years later she is somewhere eating her dinner, and smiling.