Digging at the Base of the Mountain.

I like to think that I have forever been the kind of woman who knows her body, and knows that she knows her body, not in a pretentious way but the most static way imaginable. This is how it is supposed to be, so this is how it is.

Mostly that is not true. Mostly, until maybe four years ago, I lived a life outside the body. One that was constrained, maybe, by the ways I could move, constrained but never colored. Never shadowed.

There are a lot of things I can say, about bodies. About all of your bodies. About the bodies I have known. My mother's, soft and warm in all the beaten blood ways of archetype. My father's, rough hewn all my life until it was - in a moment - reduced to the too-pink cheeks and grim smile that are the sum total of my memory, that lifeless facsimile in his casket. My best friends and myself engaged carelessly, glorying in the contact sport that is adolescence.

Our bodies are nothing short of miraculous and this is both a wonder and a dread fact, the undertow of which I tread against ceaselessly in recent days. My particular illness, my kind doctor with his furrowed brow, all these things have rolled me downhill to the dirty bottom where I run my fingers through my hair to catch tangles and spit dirt and detritus from my mouth, the dirty bottom this: the responsibility of being mortal.

If we are lucky, if we are smart, I think we learn to draw lines. We understand somewhere instinctively that there is a basic middle ground between Iron Man and the shaking drunk in the corner reeking of cigarettes and failure (what failure? the failure to rail against one's own baser pleasures?). My lines have been drawn for me this past year, baseball metaphors and tiny white pills that I never let linger long enough on the tongue to know if they were more than metaphorical in their bitterness.

I have been unkind to my body in so many ways. These were my three strikes: cigarettes, birth control, obesity. Then the ominous fourth, the omnipotent family history. A father dead at 45 from the same heart disease that killed his own father. I am lucky because I know my downfalls, I know exactly what I must not touch.

Cigarettes, birth control, obesity. Genetics.

Since March I have lost, on average, about one pound a week. This with careful deliberation, with a new kind of notebook constantly at my side, filled not with fanciful observations or brief snippets of poetry but with every single thing that crosses my lips. A handful of popcorn snatched from a friend, an ounce of creamer poured into my coffee. I have become a master of these things, I can eyeball a liquid ounce, weigh meat in my palm and know.

But even in this I have been unkind, because I have treated my body like a science experiment, and it has repaid me by becoming a stranger. The way it functions, the processes that make it mine, they have all changed, and it frustrates me, it infuriates me. I have been through something like this before, during that lost year in San Francisco, when the money was as tight as it was ever brave enough to be, and what I consumed was primarily found - day old pastries from my roommate's coffeehouse job, whatever Scott was kind enough to buy. Then I was calm with understanding; it was pure abuse, a price I paid for being inconsiderate, for never taking a moment to consider that truly this body is the one thing I'll ever have that is mine alone. Mine to own.

I am infuriated now because I do everything right. I read the labels and even if I want it, I put it back. I make my concessions, give up a midnight snack in favor of putting those two ounces of cream in my morning coffee. I have rigidly and without pity taken in 1400 calories a day, refused anything containing corn syrup, made the most of my allotment in stacks of vegetables, in carefully portioned lean protein consumed in at least a 1:2 ratio with carbohydrates. It feels ridiculous, it feels outrageous, it feels obsessive. But then I have to remind myself of this, which is an admission I have yet to make in a public forum: I have an eating disorder. It's not the sexy kind, it's not the acceptable kind. The media wouldn't give it much consideration because it's not the kind that makes you thin. But it's there, and I have to rage against it every day in the most basic of ways.

What I really want to rage against is the change. The loss of the simple comforts of knowing exactly what was going on in there and why. It isn't so bad that I get up some mornings and have to notch my belt a little tighter (though when it comes time to replace my clothes, my destitution may prove to be an issue), but there are things about being a woman - cycles and circles, rituals and rites - that feel utterly sacred. Like the fact of their existence should contain no loopholes.

Giving my body some of the respect it deserves, finally, should not have made us strangers. If anything, we should be falling in love all over again.

At the end, how will I wear it? When the mountain has fallen, I am a little uncertain about where I'm going to store my tools: someplace far enough away to be safe (from obsession, from envy, from the unrealistic expectation that being thin will change everything) but close enough to find at a moment's notice, should I need some visual reminder that I tunneled through. Where will I lay my hands in repose if not on the shelf of my belly?

The puzzles of the flesh I know will not be unraveled in a single day, metaphor being what it is, but terror holds me back even more than laziness and the unfortunate psychology of the world from which I come.