Curious Vessels

CURIOUS VESSELS:

a zine on food + the body by ellen kladky and amber sollenberger

I dreamt I woke up with my face greasy and confused, my hand clunky beneath my head and the layer of my pillow wrapped in a case stained with mascara and my tears because yes I fell asleep crying. my fist is clenching that orange bottle with ten and half Klonopin pills left in them, the same ones I didn’t take every other time I wondered if I wanted to die or just be dead. and maybe I’ll take only one or two, for a sleep that isn’t good or bad but just deep, deep enough that I can’t relive my exhausting days in the warped banality of dream logic where I say things to myself that are even meaner than the worst things I’ve thought while conscious and people aren’t lying when they say I’m too hard on myself. yeah, I wanna get too drunk to dream or maybe just too high to cry, it’s less messy that way and it’s less likely to end in vomiting, which sometimes I think is worse than dying; I mean I think I’d rather fall into a Klonopin sleep and never wake up than have to throw up one more time, because in my imaginary suicides I always drift out of living, cleanly and quietly and without leaving something to clean up after I’m gone. my demagraphism is back and so I dig into my arms with my short hard fingernails tracing jet streams of red inflamed skin that’s hot and tingly and I know to some it sounds less like I’m scraping streaks across my epidermis than a chalkboard, but if I run my nails deep enough it feels like a satisfaction that reaches my marrow. trauma-induced urticaria can worsen with strong emotions.

I had an MRI done on my brain at age 21 and a whole range of blood tests to see if a group of Florida doctors could figure out why, for example, when running across the Caloosahatchee River in the balmy April evening, I would be struck with vertigo like it was lightning, staggering to the side of the bridge and too confused to walked straight. they didn’t find anything. later, at age 23, I realized that the doctor I needed wasn’t a neurologist but a psychiatrist. the dizziness stopped—as long as I stay regular with my meds—and the itching isn’t as bad as it used to be. things don’t have to get me better with the future but sometimes they do, in pieces or temporarily. I’m just still not sure if I’m asking for progress or survival.

anhedonia

for most of my life I did not understand what it meant to “forget to eat.” sure, there were times when I’d go hours without food & my whole torso would seem to contract with a gnawing hunger, but somewhere in my brain I was always planning my next meal. last summer, though, I spent a month without seeing my psychiatrist, a long & sweaty July during which I discovered a thriving colony of bedbugs crawling from behind the baseboards into my bed frame and bookshelves. panic and anxiety combined with my tenacious depression and at some point between calculating whether my building was tall enough to ensure a quick

death if I jumped from the roof and spelling BEDBUGS in copper spray paint across the black floral sofa bed I’d bought on Marketplace for $125, I learned to forget to feed myself. my stomach will grumble, I’ll make a note to grab a snack, and then four hours and three cups of coffee later, I’ll figure out why I feel awful. needing to eat is not enough to want to eat. I’ve never quite figured out how to answer people when they ask if I’ve lost weight—I’m still the only one who laughs when I make jokes about my “depressed appetite.” after nearly fainting in a diner parking lot & with scarcely the energy to walk unassisted, I realized something was wrong. it’s still an accomplisment for me to eat three meals in one day and Dr. Erickson still asks me about my diet.

Over winter break, Maria brought out some of her high school journals and we laughed at the despair we used to feel, probably because most of what has changed since then is haircuts and sex partners and locales—our issues are recalcitrant. We’re on the same anti-depressants we were once before, and it turns out we both embarrassingly (but not so surprisingly when I really think about it) tracked our caloric intake for the day alongside talk of who we missed, and when, and how.

we are not self-contained in terms of our energies.

in high school my anxiety manifested itself as an obsessive-compulsive drive to brush my teeth. I kept spare supplies at school and brushed my teethabout seven times a day because I couldn’t focus on anything if my teeth felt dirty. I guess the idea was to limit the amount of food I ate but instead I wore down all of my soft gum tissue and now I have significant periodontic damage that can only be reversed with a surgery I’ll probably never get. I’ve stopped brushing so much and try to be gentler with myself, but someday too soon I imagine my teeth will fall out.

sight is perceived as the sense that s epa r at e s

women remain the default managers of the intimate

-lauren berlant, the female complaint