bellyache

You know when you’ve been on the toilet for what feels like fucking hours and your legs are numb and your slightly sticky from sweat and your forehead feels tight and you’ve been clenching your teeth so hard your jaw aches — that’s me most of the time. I’m always on the fucking toilet.

Wake up, open my eyes, blink once. The groan of my stomach. Toilet time. After breakfast, no matter what I eat; luminous green health smoothies, plain toast, probiotic powder sprinkled on granola that’s like chewing hard chunks of wood. I always need to shit my brains out afterwards. Lunch, I might get a break. Maybe. Sometimes I skip lunch and it punishes me for that too, my intestines groaning, literallygroaning at me. I have to leave meetings sometimes because it’s so loud. You don’t have a mouth for a reason. Shut up. Dinner — sometimes just the act of cooking sends me running to the toilet. The very smell of baked potatoes, spaghetti dripping in a fuck-you-stomach-rich sauce, or kale sprinkled with nutritional yeast. Doesn’t. Fucking. Matter. You can find me on the porcelain throne, head in my hands, hating my life.

My doctor hates me. Because I think I know better than him and his qualifications and experience seeing tons of women with belly aches and the shits. But I’m pretty sure I do ’cause I like, live in my body? And after I’ve done everything he’s suggested, no dairy, no fried foods, no alcohol, no fucking pleasure or joy, no stress, tons of exercise, yoga, running, walking, swimming — guess what? I’m still shitting. Go to therapy, he says. It’s anxiety, sweetheart. You’re anxious. Stop being so anxious! Maybe stop being so fucking idiotic. I’ve been anxious. I’ve been hyperventilating in my car because I’m too scared to go into a supermarket and ask where the chickpeas are. I’ve been shaking in my apartment hallway because I’m too anxious to speak to the neighbours and I can hear them talking outside. But that’s not me anymore. Not all of the time, anyway. It’s hard work, but I can overcome. But this. These stomach problems are driving me insane. They are taking everything out of me (literally, everything).

Ishmael hasn’t stopped mentioning how pale I am, I think it looks worse to him because he’s so blessed in melanin, but still, I am really pale. There is no light behind my eyes. And pull my eyelids down and my flesh is so light it looks like raw chicken. I…