Feed

I love myself. Sophia Amoruso told me to.
I love myself, as long as myself is comprehensive: each tendon and layer of fat, every bone, all my blood, and viscera. I love myself, as long as myself includes everything inside of me: all of my parasites, coiled and curled in my guts. Yes, I love them especially.
Most people never learn to love what consumes them. Not as I have.
Before my parasites came to me, slithering amongst my tender flesh, I felt ashamed, sucking saccharine juice the color of blood from the fragile arils of a pomegranate. I felt ashamed as I guzzled wine and devoured egg whites and boiled chicken. I was not only ashamed of my wanting — my hunger, never sated, tearing through me like a pack of wild, starving wolves — but of my need. I did not want to need. I wanted to abstain, to exist without. Without anything. To be an impossible someone who required nothing at all.
Your body will not allow you to suffocate yourself; your lungs breathe because they are designed to, with or without your effort. But to consume, to devour (any synonym to avoid that word: eat), is to choose, actively, to live. To nourish and sustain and feed yourself is an admittance that you find yourself worthy of care and satiation.
I wanted my body to spin itself through my life on its own, like my lungs, expanding and collapsing.
My body is not my own anymore. I’ve seen Mary of Nazareth in the monthly blood running down my thighs — I have power curled up and twisted inside of my belly — and I know that to devour and be devoured is to be worshipped. To be adored.
I feed my parasites; handfuls of olives from a jar of sour, fetid vinegar; bunches of pulpy, bloated grapes; sweet gobs of honeycomb that make my teeth ache, chased by mouthfuls of rancid cream.
As I sit on the observation room table, like an insect on flypaper, the doctors tell me that I must take their drugs — poison myself with antiparasitics — because every gap and sliver of space between my organs is now packed tight with worms and protozoa, roiling and squirming inside of me.
They are eating me alive from the inside out.
I’ve known this, of course, but the doctors do not understand. I am Mary, full of hope, pushing it out between her dark, fourteen-year-old thighs. I am Jesus on the cross, sure, but more than that, I am Saint Agnes with a sword through her trachea, surveyed by men’s blind eyes, kneeling on the blood-soaked floor at the altar of my god.
My god is inside of me, and they know the most intimate, ugly parts of me. They see me for what I am, taste it, and stay with me. It, transformative, fills me up, and makes me into something.
I was nothing, once, but I will never be nothing again. When I have been devoured and my god has eaten me alive, I will become what I love: a many-headed, monolithic chimera, full on my flesh, drunk on my blood. There are few who know such a devotion.
So I wash my body with rose water and finely spun linens. I kiss my skin, for it is my god’s skin. I eat when I am hungry and sleep when I am sad. My pulse thrums under my perfumed skin. I watch bath bombs melt away like butter, dancing through the rapturous water as it dyes it pink and purple and blue, a galaxy for me to rest in. I drink my citrus and cucumber-infused water out of a mason jar as I scroll through my Instagram feed, all baby-pink graphics telling me that I’m a fucking queen and photos of impossible women who abstain, who require nothing at all.
I devour. I abstain. I love myself. I abstain. I am devoured.
My god is a hungry god.

***

Erin Samantha Hanson (she/they) is a stage actor, fiction writer, playwright, and artist currently living in the wilds of northern Wyoming. She won the Make It Safe Project Writing Scholarship in 2020 and was subsequently published in The Make It Safe Project's writing anthology First Love. They spent some time studying Musical Theatre and Playwriting in New York City where her play Gallery was performed in the Freshly Baked 48-hour Playwriting Festival. She likes to spend her free time playing with her very small black cat, Lydia.