Do Not Resuscitate

Stops.

Everything stops.

Except the grating echo of my voice. The soundwaves are a distorted mixtape, a new soundtrack to family therapy warring with for dominance with the ticking of the clock. It bounces off the walls of Dr. Psychologist Barbie’s office, shatters the stillness into infinite glassy, sharp-edged pieces, twists the universe around and around itself until it’s unrecognizable.

But the words themselves mean nothing.

They’re hollow place keepers for something else entirely, and I don’t know what that something is but it’s there—in my chest, my lungs, my throat, my gut, my veins—the correct answer to an unasked question, and if I could just sift through the clutter of nothingness populating my brain, maybe, just maybe, I could find it.

“Dannilynn?”

And I look at her, Dr. Psychologist Barbie, and I can see in her the awareness that I’ve lost my mental footing. Her second skin of confident anticipation has shed. In its wake, this curiosity so raw I might hurl up words to pseudo satisfy it.

Fuck.

“Do you want to say something?”

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

“Anything at all?”

That wasn’t two minutes.

She leans forward, and I am lost in encouraging blues. “Talk to me, Danny. Tell me what’s going on.”

I can’t.

“Because your parents, well, they seem pretty confused.”

She waits… waits… and it’s dangling on the tip of my tongue, some pattern of vowels and constants and sometimes Y’s jumbled up, the correct answer nudging itself into being but she’s not asking the right questions and instead she refers to her clipboard littered in bullshitted nonsense. Like she can analyze sheets of paper and come out with the solution to this mess, and the longer she flips through her notes, the more Mom and Dad and Val believe she can fix me, prescribe me some pills so I can be a functioning teen again, as if I ever was functioning, and they watch in rapt fascination in my peripheral while she draws her conclusions.

Stamp the bright red F on my folder, Dr. Psychologist Barbie, move on. Let me leave.

She doesn’t.

She looks at me. Looks, that’s all, but there’s this alertness in her eyes, a sharpness honed in on me. Somewhere in the blank spaces between her, no doubt perfect looping cursive, handwriting, she’s found what she was searching for, and I… I want to hear what she has to say.

“Something’s wrong, and I don’t think it’s what we think it is.”

Yes.

Wait, no.

“The amount of damage you’ve done to your body, that’s from years of destructive eating habits,” she says, “Binge eating, purging, restricting, you’ve hid it, I’d guess, since early childhood.”

Idon’thaveaneatingdisorderIdon’thaveaneatingdisorderIdon’thaveaneatingdisorder.

But my heart is thumping frantically, trying to burst through my ribcage or make my ICD discharge for funsies or collapse in an act of self-preservation, and the telltale flush is pigmenting my skin, and I’m choking on snapshots too vague to materialize into pictures—sleeves of cookies, Mom’s leftovers, the snacks from behind a teacher’s desk, shoplifted junk food, orange juice, so much orange juice, a parade of food and beverage eaten in closets, bathroom stalls, my rooms, fat, fat, fat, the rush of vomiting, vows to diet, cuts on hidden skin to stop the hunger, stuffing my fat face again, cycling in an exhausting routine, breaking.

I don’t have an eating disorder.

I don’t.

“And you get caught now.” She tilts her head. “Why?”

You know damn well why.

“What’s really going on right now, Danny?”

I’m dying.

I’m. Dying.

And the words, those words, are pressing up against my teeth, trying to seep through the cracks and jump into the ether. They fill my lungs, my throat, my stomach, my brain, ride on blood platelets and circulate my body until they’re the only thing that exists. I can’t breathe around them and I’m shaking and clenched too tightly and my whole body hurts and I think I’m rocking and I can’t stop.

Those aren’t the right words.

They’re not. The ever vague something else is buried underneath them and I don’t have the clarity to unearth them, and they keep staring at me, Mom and Dad and Val and Dr. Psychologist Barbie, expecting the correct answer to the ultimate test question that is family therapy.

Stop it. Stop looking at me. Stop expecting things out of me. Stop trying. Stop. Stop, stop, stop, stop—

“Are you okay?” Dr. Psychologist Barbie asks.

“No.”

It’s pitiful and weepy and scratchy, but this is the answer she’s been looking for, the admission of not okay-ness that’s supposedly the first step in recovery.

“Talk it out, Danny.”

She doesn’t understand. No one understands.

“I can’t.”

I can’t.

And I’m enveloped in a cocoon of parents.

I don’t know how. I missed something, I’m sure I did. The world skipped a track, from staring Dr. Psychologist Barbie in her ridiculously blue eyes to being smooshed against a wall of muscle and crushed in vice grips. My parents are an amorphous blob that’s trying to hold my broken insides together—if they squeeze tightly enough, they think, they can soothe the impending collapse—and… and…

It’s nice.

Warm. Safe. Comfortable. Every sappy word in the dictionary, and I like it. All that matters is this hug, this moment, not my fuckups of the past or the uncertain future, just this.

I can breathe again.

I don’t understand.

“Whatever’s happening,” Dr. Psychologist Barbie’s disembodied voice drifts, “we’ll get you through it. I promise.”

Correct answer, lodged in my throat and welling tears: I don't want to die.