I, A Number
Healthy: ≥ 18.5
Summer, 2026
It has not been so long—this part is easy to forget.
Today I take my bike to the gravel path by the water, past snowberry and spindles of horsetail snagging wind. The name of the bay is Boundary. The footpaths lose themselves in the delta like inverted scars.
Now I scarcely think when I pedal the overpass. I lift my body careless from the soft log supine in the marsh. Down in the mudflats the rivulets cut palm-lines toward the bay. To kneel in the grass is a renewable fall. Ascension—now unmarked.
For Merleau-Ponty, a refusal to eat is a retreat from existence. “Swallowing symbolizes the movement of existence that allows itself to undergo events and assimilate them.”
I hold messiness in my mouth like a strange fruit. Dust-diving tire-first past stables of sweet hay and the lowered heads of milking cows in late afternoon.
Today my body is a body. Another animal tousling the grass. Another animal abandoning each breath with the sureness of the next beginning. How the slender-necked bird in the mud sets down a leg, then takes flight—with such guarantee.
My body is not as good a liar as a want. Mornings after days like this: waking dizzy, standing up and dizzy, lying sideways on my bed not-reading and dizzy, at my desk and dizzy falling into my eyes like hair.
It has been over a year since the last time I was dying. Again, I have declared myself not-sick too soon.
The name Boundary seems to be prodding me. How can a bay be a boundary?
Where is the boundary?
Mild: ≥ 17
Summer, 2024
I stop eating again. I sleep through the morning and afternoon. When I wake I get out of bed downward. The white sun fills this room like jelly.
I roll face down and let one leg dangle. Wait for my rabbit heart to stop kicking. Set the other leg down and slide kneeling to the carpet, cheek still pressed to the cold duvet. Pause again for my heart, for the frantic wet slap of it.
It has been ten minutes and I have not yet taken a step. For six months, this was every morning.
Endless summer rushes in, white as teeth.
For Merleau-Ponty, a refusal to eat is a retreat from existence. “Swallowing symbolizes the movement of existence that allows itself to undergo events and assimilate them.”
An eating disorder, then, is a mode of being. Or, rather, a mode of unbeing.
Body, caught off guard, shoves static curtains back over the windows of itself.
Every now and again, the online eating disorder forums set to the task of ontology.
Of their metaphysical pursuits, one most frequent is the construct of “atypical” anorexia. People with atypical anorexia meet all criteria for anorexia except low weight.
Some say the underweight criterion is essential to treatment, to good triage, and, sometimes, to the “real thing.” Some say the label discriminates, that to make weight the arbiter of a “real” anorexic gatekeeps a condition that is often never about weight in the first place.
The eating disorder forums circle one way and then another like stranded planes.
According to Plato, being is thinkable/referable/countable. We can predicate of things; we can quantify things. Does countability make a thing a thing?
As for anorexia, the DSM draws a border around it. The DSM puts up little numbers like marking flags at the edge of each crossing.
Summer of 2024, the DSM does not yet consider me anorexic.
First there was a word. Henceforth: a real thing.
Or was there first a number?
Moderate: ≥ 16-16.99
Fall, 2024
My life keeps shrinking.
I stop talking to people, I shut myself in my room all summer, sleeping. When the fall comes, I move back on campus, enrol in three courses, and drop two. I stop holding the door for people behind me. All excess falls away and soon I stop sleeping.
All I know is that I need to work. Somewhere in the fog-stuffed corridors of my brain I am convinced this is the missing solution to my life, convinced that as long as I hold onto my studenthood I am okay, I am lucid, I am not dying.
Still my life shrunk.
And the body followed, a postscript.
And the body followed, a symptom.
Soon, I was undeniably dying. But as long as I was still going to class, it did not matter that I was dying.
Late October. A dirt field below my building, and all afternoon the wind comes and scrapes it clean.
The diagnostic cut-off for an underweight BMI is 18.5. For this reason, some people set their first goal weight precisely to this number. I want to have a “real” ED, they say. I want to be valid.
Here is the boundary where unreal, codified, crosses to the privileged field of substance.
Here is atypical solidifying towards tangibility. Anorexia in an emaciated body is eating-disorder-done-right. The only “real thing.”
Why does this interest me? I had the bones.
Had I stepped foot in the ER in October 2024, I would’ve been made anorexic. The hospital buildings became patrolmen. To stay unwitnessed is to be unreal a little while longer.
Severe: ≥ 15-15.99
Falling, 2024
Suddenly a nurse calls.
By the season’s end I will be in the ICU, but for now I wear four layers and am always cold. Evening, deserted, regurgitates wet leaves.
The nurse is saying, you need to go to the hospital.
I can’t, I say.
If you don’t go to the hospital you could die.
I can’t.
You could have a heart attack.
The rain clots black on the sidewalk outside. I had more weight to lose, I wasn’t done. I was so close to another low. I was certain, measurement was capture.
The clinic has eyes. Foucault is clear about this. What matters less to me is what it sees, but the question: What does it not?
By then my body was steadily eating its muscles, my body wasting its way to my heart.
Suddenly the call is dead. By then time itself was eaten through to bone.
At the hospital, I am wheeled straight past triage. The nurse has already called ahead.
The clinic has eyes. Foucault is clear about this. What matters less to me is what it sees, but the question: What does it not?
This is not the first time I am hospitalized for anorexia nervosa. Admitted for the first time two years ago, I was cachexic and more body than ever. Body for the morning blood needle. Body for the child-sized blood pressure cuff. Seven a.m., or was it six, in the blindness of black morning, body awakened by nurse probing body handing body a blue gown, commode body, sitting body swapping seats. Body wheeled by metal chair to the industrial scale.
The mirror doubled my one face. Each shift the nurses unstacked me. I temperature, I toothless oxygen clip, I two fingers wrangling pulse.
It was a few days after Christmas in the old hospital wing. December blanched our plastic tree, string lights wilted muddy by morning.
Does countability make a thing a thing?
For a long time I studied the dirty feet of mirrors. Storefront panels, dead phone screens—the world is mirror-saturated. I am always looking away. I still jolt to see myself watching.
After decades of attempts, most philosophers now agree that subjective experience is unquantifiable. Chalmers coins the failure of such physicalist accounts as the hard problem of consciousness.
Contort material in every way; propose substrates, biomarkers, minimal conditions. Material, measurable, produces no “I.” No number reaches phenomena.
In the morning I wake breathless, my heartbeat flapping in my ears. I can’t lift my head from the pillow, can’t sit up in bed.
Picture the psychiatrist slightly squinting as my weight chart skews like a drooping smile.
To quantify the “I” is to move in the wrong direction. Number, then: splitting.
Extreme: ≤ 15
Winter, 2024
I start avoiding gum and black coffee. I put tablespoons of zero-sugar syrup in my tea then dump it all out, paranoid. I speak in class and remember nothing. My chest thrums all the time with static.
In the morning I wake breathless, my heartbeat flapping in my ears. I can’t lift my head from the pillow, can’t sit up in bed.
My life shrinks further. Counting keeps me at the border. Counting keeps me bordered. I become periphery.
The idea that any serving size less than five calories can be legally rounded to zero haunts me. I email all the zero-sugar syrup companies. Calculate full bottles, then teaspoons again and again.
From the outside, I watch my bones under my skin with an archaeological fascination. It has been a long time since hunger reached me. My life shucks off my body like a too-small oyster shell.
By November I am waiting to die.
And still I number. I, a number. At the store, I turn all the iced teas number outward. Number streams down the hips of bottles like a leak under the door of being.
Early December. My weight is four points past “extreme.” The days leading up to the ER mash together in dreamlike disarray.
I am taken to the ICU. I lose three days and wake up cuffed to the bed. The nasogastric tube fixes around the bone in the centre of my face.
Of the ICU, I remember almost nothing, and I don’t want to revisit the flashes I do.
A month in hospital. I watched the care aides roll my body over in bed. Part of me wants to say I fought against refeeding; fighting, the script of the “real” anorexic. And I did, as soon as I could lift my arms again—diverted my tube feed into empty Ensure bottles, diluted the bag with water from the sink. But never more than gesture to the classic story.
I kept the blanket away from my face when asked. I stepped backward on the scale and did not ask for the number. I was numb, and mostly just relieved to be on bedrest.
Still, now, I think of this time as a thaw. I settled back into myself slowly, like river silt. Merleau-Ponty, after Hegel, understands being as process, as becoming.
What flags mark the field into which I am becoming?
I don’t know if I will have a recovery story. Mostly, the physical return has been uneventful. And where it was not, I am trying to be a student of unimportance. I am trying to unlearn the urgent event that was each moment of measure.
Body: A Postscript
Summer, 2026
The name of this bay is Boundary. At low tide, the water peels far back to bare the broad backs of the sand banks.
I throw my bike in the tufts of wintercress and enter the copse. Late afternoon is still hot and mosquito-stunned. I wade chest to chest with the goldenrod, the earth beneath me soft like a lung.
Discreteness seems a fiction here, an easy convenience. As it would be a convenience to say this place resolves me. I return to the present because this is where I am. Here I am.
Blackberries push against the wire grid fence, break all the invisible windows. In the amber pocket of afternoon, the brush comes alive with uncountable wings.
The bay goes on, endlessly becoming.
I am trying to see this water in its holy indifference. To take a body in its small moments, its restlessness.
To take a body as nothing else.
Which is to say, I am still moving. Even now.
