by Bel Mercado
Swan Queens
Content Warning: Graphic depiction of eating disorders
Elena set her laptop on the rim of her sink so she could simultaneously look at her reflection and the image of me tucked into the corner of the screen. The overhead light, yellow, buzzing, cast dramatic shadows under her cheekbones and collarbones, and when she began to brush her teeth, I could tell she’d been purging more. I wanted to say something useful—I love you, I’m worried about you, did you tell your friends at school what’s been going on like you promised me you would? —but instead, tongue-in-cheek, I said, “Do you want to watch Black Swan?”
She smiled at me, her mouth foamy, and nodded. By this point, Elena and I had probably watched the movie together dozens of times over video call. We could recite many scenes by heart, giggling, leaning close to the cameras of our laptops to hum the melody of “Swan Lake.” In a town outside Washington D.C., a little less than 4,000 miles away from Elena’s apartment in France, my sleepy eyes illuminated only by the glow of the screen, I set up the movie while she went through her morning routine. We wouldn’t be able to finish Black Swan before she left for high school and I fell asleep, but we could skip to our favorite parts. As Natalie Portman danced on the screen, my eyes flicked from her body to the image of Elena washing her face, patting it dry with shaking fingers. I checked my own hands, wrinkled my nose, and asked Elena, “Do you think I should fast tomorrow?”
“Of course not.” She clicked her tongue. “But I shouldn’t purge either.”
“I won’t fast, so don’t purge,” I said.
“Good luck,” she retorted, then paused. “But I’ll try if you do.”
As a teenager, I was jealous of bulimic girls. I hated how they could be skinnier than anorexic girls and enjoy that skinniness with a smile on their face. Online, my anorexic friends and I were miserable after fasting and restricting, then overflowing with guilt when we ate a slice of pizza, whether or not we dabbed off the grease. We looked at pictures of our bulimic counterparts and pointed out all the things we wanted. I want her jawline, we thought to ourselves, her hips, her calves, the gentle, flowing curves of each individual rib as they lead to the arch of her clavicle. We wanted to have our cake and eat it too.
But Elena, my bulimic best friend, was equally jealous of me. She was my mirror image, perfectly opposite in every way. She reveled in excess, in over-indulgence. I’d obsessively check her messages to me and see that she’d sent pictures of pancakes stacked in uneven piles, so drenched in syrup that they bled and oozed onto the table, bowls and bowls of cereal drowning in cream and honey, half-melted chocolates and full-sugar sodas, croissants. Asking: could you eat all this? could you enjoy it? She wanted my self-control and my fanatical desire for perfection, my compulsion to go days on nothing but little piles of salt and ice cubes. She admired the fact that I could overlap my fingers when I gripped my forearm—the skinny test, we called it—and that my minimalistic lifestyle bordered on nonbeing. She loved me for being taller and thinner. I loved her for being shorter and lighter. Our friendship was built on intensity, on envy, on image, on valor and humiliation and beauty.
Ultimately, restrictive eating disorders are about control. I couldn’t reconcile my tumultuous childhood—a new home nearly every year, sexual abuse in my adolescence, a belief that nobody noticed or cared about my health—with my need for stability and normalcy. Choosing what to eat, if I ate at all, felt like one of the few things in my life I could control. I was an underweight teenager, but I never saw myself that way. I hoped, like many other anorexic teens, to disappear. This has everything and nothing to do with weight.
—
Like many disordered kids of the era, we met on Tumblr. She probably found my account through a hashtag (#ana #mia #ed #thinspo #bonespo, among many, many others) or while mindlessly scrolling through body progress pics, low-cal meal ideas, or eating disorder (ed) memes. I can’t be sure. I deleted my archive—a blog with hundreds of posts, pictures, and messages— several years after the beginning of our friendship with the hope that my departure from Tumblr marked the end of my disordered thoughts and behaviors. Some messages and posts I can recall verbatim, their alignment of words and gifs so impactful I couldn’t tear them out of my brain. I make my best guess at others, recreating the language of the subculture with a healthy mixture of habit and speculation.
What I know for certain is that Elena sent me her first message after she found my kcal diary, likely when we were twelve or thirteen years old. This was, in retrospect, the golden age of Tumblr, especially regarding eating disorder content. It was the strange era of the internet in which there was practically no regulation. Born to Die had reached massive critical success, and it was impossible to go more than a few posts without seeing a black and white gif of Lana Del Rey thinspo. Similarly, the widespread love for The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Fault in Our Stars popularized the image of the manic pixie dream girl for girls, the effortless, quirky, liberated, and frightfully skinny young woman whose rich inner life suggested a form of feminine solipsism, one where it seemed that girls could survive on nothing but cigarettes and melancholic poetry. This was the year when, on an average afternoon, I could scroll through my homepage and find ed meal inspo, quotes from Looking for Alaska overlaid on a picture of Vans with a dreamy filter, self-harm wounds along a fifteen-year-old’s arm, Eugenia Cooney’s bones, and uncensored gifs of lesbian porn—the beautiful ones that make you feel warm instead of a little bit dirty. My blog was hardly any different, a collage of calorie diaries and coquettish thinspo. When she found my Tumblr account, I imagine Elena saw a post that read something like this:
weight: 54.97 kg (ew)
kcal diary:
half an apple – 40 kcals
2 tbsp peanut butter – 200 kcals (omfg)
cherry limeade ice – 5 kcals
1 KitKat bar – 53 kcals
total: 298 kcals
i’m srsly so disgusting. ugh. i can’t control my eating AT ALL and my mom offered me one of her fucking kitkat bars and i said yes even though i was gonna fast from 4 pm today to 12 pm tomorrow 😦 i’m so out of control. and who knew there were so many kcals in peanut butter??? i don’t ever want to touch it again
In the eating disorder community, we measured ourselves with kilograms and kilocalories instead of pounds and calories, even if we used the imperial system for every other measurement. Maybe it conjured romantic images of being disordered in some luxurious historic city, spending our days languidly sprawled across a chaise longue and lamenting the banality of existence. Or, more likely, it felt good seeing our weight represented by smaller numbers.
When Elena first DM’ed me, I checked out her profile before I responded. There were too many narcs, wannarexics, and old men who wanted to see my feet for me to feel comfortable blindly jumping into a conversation. To my relief, her bio included the age-old eating disorder mantra with her data:
nothing tastes as good as skinny feels
starting weight: 65 kg
current weight: 52 kg
goal weight: 50 kg
ultimate goal weight: 45 kg
I knew Elena was real. With no further hesitation, I opened the chat and replied.
hi ❤ are u ana or mia?
hi!! i’m ana ❤ hbu?
mia !! omg i’m so jealous
ooo lol why jealous?
bc ana girls are always so dainty
i’m literally nooooooowhere close to dainty haha but thanks!!
ok but i saw ur body check and ur like. perf.
ur so sweet omfg!! what’s ur name?
elena
what’s urs?
bel or bella, u can choose 🙂
awh but elena is literally the prettiest name ever
it’s like a fairy’s name or something
shut up !!
!!!
noooooo just kidding! sorry idk how to act with girls haha
it’s ok!! are u from the states?
nooo, france 🙂 but i wanna live in the states
are u srs??? i used to live close to france!! i rly wanna visit again
that’s so cool!!
wbu?
i just moved to the east coast in the usa 🙂 it’s like soooo pretty here
i’m rly jealous!
—
Elena and I were magnetized. Despite the different time zones, we made it work. Every spare moment we had, we’d talk, text, send each other ed memes, and spend time together on Rabb.it—a now-defunct website that enabled us to stream movies and TV shows in a video chat room—while we tallied up the day’s calories. She was the one person in my life who understood my compulsions. Our disorders were wildly different, almost diametrically opposed. Elena couldn’t imagine coping with my daily lightheadedness and fatigue, and I, emetophobic and struggling with undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder, wouldn’t be caught dead kneeling in front of a toilet bowl. However, we shared the loneliness of eds, the oppressive feeling that I have earned all the shitty things I’m feeling right now, and we loved one another for it. We whispered it in the tender pauses of our conversations. I love you. I love you.
Any opportunity we had to watch movies—usually in the middle of the night for me, my hungriest hours, and early in the morning for her, so she could watch and get ready for school at the same time—we would seize with excitement. Girl, Interrupted was a regular favorite, as were Suspiria and Carrie—the ones from the ‘70s. We watched Clueless when we wanted something lighthearted and Jennifer’s Body when we wanted to trigger ourselves into restricting for a few days. We gorged ourselves on vicarious explosions of feminine rage.
When Elena turned 15, shortly before my own birthday, we became obsessed with Black Swan, an Aronofsky film about a ballerina’s descent into madness as she trains to play both the White Swan and the Black Swan in a performance of Swan Lake. I loved Nina, the protagonist, with bizarre intensity. I loved her drive for perfection, her compulsion to get things exactly, one hundred percent right. What I loved more was her nose, the slender, smooth slope up to her brow, and her elbows, and her ankles and knees. I loved how little she was, how she hardly took up any space on the screen. Elena preferred Lily, Nina’s antagonistic understudy, which wasn’t a surprise to me. They had the same dark, brooding features, the same sly drawl to their voices. We especially loved, our eyes self-indulgent and hungry, the scene where Nina stabs Lily to death in a dressing room with a scythe-like shard of mirror. Their bodies are lithe and boney, and there’s a sublime streak of blood down Lily’s pointed chin, brilliantly off-center. We sucked at our lips as we watched Nina sob and heave and pant, her face contorted into a deep and mangled smile, and we asked one another if we wanted to rewind and watch the scene again.
During a particularly obsessive week, we watched Black Swan six nights in a row. We only stopped our streak because Elena’s mother caught her purging and took her phone and computer as punishment. Elena lied and said she had food poisoning, but her mother didn’t believe her. I waited for days to hear back from her, anxiously checking our messages and her blog for any signs of activity, afraid of the worst. I initially worried that she’d been forced into recovery, a metaphorical death in the ed community. I pictured a blue and white hospital gown draped awkwardly over her meager frame, an oxygen tube in both nostrils, living for weeks stripped of the basic courtesy of taking a shit without a nurse keeping a careful eye on her. I recognized that this was not such a terrible fate, though I wouldn’t have admitted it as a teenager. Forced hospitalization was traumatic, humiliating, and likely unhelpful in the course of sustained recovery, but it lacked the permanence and gravity of death.
Eating disorders are the deadliest mental illnesses, period. One in five people with anorexia die by suicide, and that death rate doesn’t include those who die from starvation, malnutrition, cancer, osteoporosis, and other diseases caused or exacerbated by anorexia. On MyProAna, an eating disorder forum often criticized for its easy access to tips and tricks of the disordered trade, I found one of many posts detailing the ways in which disordered girls die. Forum users recalled friends who died in the bathroom, on the kitchen floor, in a hospital, their stomachs and esophagi ripped apart from the force of repeated binging and purging. They remembered the suicides, the involuntary psychiatric holds, the hidden and unhidden self-harm. But the most common memory, one shared by nearly everyone in the forum, concerned the friends who were online every day and suddenly, without context or closure, vanished.
—
In 2017, while scrolling on Tumblr, I watched a viral video entitled “The Photo Everyone with an Eating Disorder Should See.” Before my shaky finger pressed play, I wondered, is it gonna be puke in a toilet? bonespo? deathspo? been there, done that. what’s the worst it could be? Following a brief content warning, the video depicted the dead body of a nineteen-year-old girl slumped over a toilet. According to the autopsy report, her stomach ruptured after she ate over five liters of food. She wasn’t able to purge after a binge, a bulimic’s worst nightmare.
Her left arm sloped into the bowl at a severe angle, cranking her neck forward unnaturally. Her fingers were black. The skin of her arms and legs was blue and purple and gray, and her distended stomach rested just inches from her bone-thin arms. It’s hard to look at now, and it was even harder when I was a teenager. She was only two years older than me. I couldn’t see her face. That stuck with me. I could see her naked body in rigor mortis, her bruised flesh and necrotic fingers and toes, but I couldn’t see her face. For better or for worse, I could never get the Girl out of my head. Her horror was electrifying. In spite of the gore and death—or maybe because of it—I felt some sort of sickening pull toward her. I wanted to disappear, after all.
For weeks after my seventeenth birthday, I had a recurring nightmare. I binged on leftovers, felt guilty, and went to the bathroom in an attempt to purge, but like every other attempt up to that point, I couldn’t get past my overwhelming fear of germs and vomit to go through with it. As I tried to stand up, my throat raw and my stomach aching, the Girl stumbled into the bathroom and landed, on her hands and knees, in front of the door. She reached out to me.
The stench of rot and death infected the bathroom. As I scrambled into the bathtub on the other side of the room, I registered that her face wasn’t really a face. It was a mess of bone and skin and meat, swirling and shifting with each desperate movement toward me. The Girl let out a low, phlegmy moan as she approached, her swollen belly dragging across the floor as she stretched her blackened fingers toward my face. I finally vomited from the smell of death and the primal fear rushing across my skin. I couldn’t fight, and I couldn’t flee, so I froze. I sat there, covered in vomit and sweat, waiting for her to grab me.
Ashamed of my terror, I woke up from each nightmare with a pounding heart and a twisted stomach. When I saw her—in my dreams, on my phone screen, in the brief flashes of imagination while I ate breakfast or reluctantly skipped dinner—I wanted to love her. Instead, I feared for her like I did Elena. The two could have been the same in my mind.
—
My relationship with Elena was queer, maybe, in the way that young queer girls can swallow each other before they know any better. I hesitate to entangle queerness with something so impure. Our connection was gentle and caring, romantic at times but more generally loving, focused on harm reduction as opposed to alienation or a push deep into the ed underground. We sent each other articles about electrolytes. She congratulated me the last time I ate a funnel cake at the county fair, about eight years ago, with powdery fingers texting her the good news. After a particularly brutal purge, I told her I loved her beyond her rotting teeth.
Our tender, shameful intimacy is one that I struggle to define. My conscience begs to call it toxic, to wrap it up in the horror of my adolescence. I want to grab my relationship with Elena by the throat and carve the word problematic across its emaciated jaw, sew up its lips with the simplicity of toxicity. I want the remains of our love to pose as a haunting reminder of my immaturity and guilt in some dark corner of my memory. But queer love, especially queer teenage love, is fundamentally slippery, ephemeral, resistant to definition. Our relationship pours from the cracks between my fingers like salt. The evanescence of queerness tells me to reconsider, to reframe, to praise the amorphous and uncertain. Maybe I wasn’t evil, cruel, or resentful, and maybe our relationship wasn’t toxic. Maybe we were just sick teenagers.
—
âlllloooooo
hi hi hi
how r u
so good lol
why?
i tried coco at a club last nite and i love it
?? what do u mean
one sec i’ll look up the translation
k
and why were u at a club? idk like i thought that clubs were for hookups and stuff
i’m not trying to police u or anything, i’m just kinda confused
aren’t we a thing?
u there?
it’s cocaine!
oh
why?
it makes u skinny
… babe i don’t think that’s how it works
what do you know?
??
elena are u doing ok?
ur so boring
i can never have fun when i text u
that’s fucked up. why would u say that?
idk why i’m texting u. ur dead inside all the time.
don’t act like you’re all innocent.
??????
you made me sick.
sick??
i didn’t make you anything.
yes you did
you definitely didn’t fucking help
i don’t even know what ur talking about
i thought we were helping each other
so?
are u not gonna respond to me?
lolll did i hurt your feelings?
fat cunt.
My stomach twisted in shock. Fuck, I whispered, fuck you. After four years of friendship, Elena knew that an insult involving weight, however ironic it may have been, would destroy me, push me deeper into the well she and I had been halfheartedly trying to climb out of. Empty of everything but shame and guilt, I threw my phone and stormed out of my bedroom. I expected to walk out of my bedroom onto the carpeted landing leading downstairs, but my bare feet stepped onto glassy, cool concrete. The pleather futon, the plastic side table weighed down with books, the Parisian artwork on the walls vanished. My attachment to reality dissolved, and I entered the dressing room from Black Swan. I tried to mask a little sob as a gasp. I couldn’t let my makeup run. I was expected onstage in just a few minutes. My makeup needed to be flawless, my mind clear, my body dressed in dark tulle. I leaned my head against the door for a second to calm myself, ignoring the oppressive gray bricks of my private dressing room. I felt lucky. Most of the cast had to share a mirror-lined room to prepare for the performance, and I had this space all to myself.
“Rough start, huh?”
I whipped my head toward the mirror and saw Elena at my dressing table, dressed in the Black Swan’s corset and tulle. She had a smile on her face that feigned compassion but oozed self-confidence and superiority.
“Must’ve been pretty humiliating,” she said, hardly taking her attention away from her image in the mirror to acknowledge me.
“Get out of my room.” My voice cracked, and I flushed, ashamed.
“See, I’m just worried about the next act,” Elena said after clicking her tongue. “I’m not sure you’re feeling up to it.”
“Stop,” I begged. “Please stop.”
“How about…” Elena stood and stepped towards me, but as she did, her face morphed into Lily’s. “…I dance the Black Swan for you?”
Blind rage. Instant. I shoved Elena-Lily into the full-body mirror behind her. She cried out in pain as the glass shattered into her back, carving out wounds like feathers across her skin. She grabbed my biceps and pulled me down with her.
“Leave me alone!” I wailed. Glass sliced open my shins and knees as I straddled her sharp hips. I felt no pain. No anger, either. In that moment, my emotions dissipated and made room for shock. What did I do? Elena-Lily laid on the floor below me, silent and still. Dreadful peace, for a moment, wound through the air.
Although dazed, she reached up with both her hands and choked me. I noted with a brief spark of delight that her fingers overlapped around my neck. She squeezed tightly, crushing my windpipe, and I desperately slid my hands across the floor to find something to defend myself with. I gripped a large shard of the mirror, raised it, and plunged it deep into her abdomen, ignoring the sensation of the glass tearing my palm apart.
“It’s my turn,” I hissed, and Lily’s face morphed back to Elena’s. A small dribble of blood spilled out of her mouth, brilliantly off-center, as I pushed the shard deeper into her stomach. She was hurt, and I wanted to stop. But I didn’t.
I raised the shard again, and in a smooth and controlled arc, I plunged it back into her stomach. The air in her lungs escaped with a wheeze, and her face shifted once more. She was Susanna from Girl, Interrupted, with her thin, pointed nose and her perfect jawline. I looked at the shattered mirror around us, and the face reflecting back at me was Angelina Jolie as Lisa, with dry, yellow, bleached hair fluffed up and unstyled.
I stabbed her again, and once more, we transformed. She was Madame Blanc, and I was Suzy.
Again. Needy Lesnicki and Jennifer Check.
Again. Tai and Cher.
Again. Margaret and Carrie White.
I was nothing but divine feminine rage, horrific excess, a creature of hatred and hunger and irreverence and desire and then, once more, nothing. Just as quickly as it started, it was over, and my dressing room filled with dreadful peace once again. Blood streamed out of her stomach, drenching the shredded fabric of her costume to a shade deeper than black. Shimmering beads and sequins, loose on the ground around us, became dull as they, too, were submerged in blood. A lone black feather rested near her pelvis.
The adrenaline caught up with me, and with shaking hands and breath, I tried to pull the glass out. Instead, the shard snapped in half, leaving the embedded portion deep within Elena’s flesh. She looked at her wound, then at me, and she whispered, fat cunt.
I dropped the piece of mirror as my breath became squeaky and sharp. Another burst of shock spread through my limbs as someone knocked at the door.
“Black Swan, places in five,” a man said from behind the door, oblivious to the carnage within my dressing room.
This performance was more important than Elena, than food or life itself. I dragged her dead or dying body into the closet as the other chunks of shattered glass crowned her head like a halo. When she was hidden within the closet, I took a deep breath and regained total control of my body. My panic abandoned me with a delightful shudder.
I returned to my dressing table and prepared for the next act. The mirror presented my reflection, simply me, although I didn’t feel much like myself anymore. I picked up a thin tube of lipstick with still, bloodied hands before applying it with a grace I’d never known before. A smile briefly split across my face, just a moment to make sure I was presentable to the audience. I could hear them speaking through the concrete walls, their chatter and excitement softened into vague murmurs. They wanted the final act. All my practice, my dedication and ambition, my fasting and restricting, all of it had been for this. I was born to perform, to put my dainty, perfect body to the test, to show that an ana girl could be just as pretty, skinny, and unrestrained as Elena was.
And then I heard that phlegmy moan.
My facade dropped. The confidence that filled me before was a pathetic echo. I wasn’t Angelina Jolie anymore, or Jennifer Check, or any other confidently imperfect woman I desperately desired to become. I was a teenager, a disordered girl, fragile. My heart pounded in my throat, exacerbating the pain and bruising I felt from being choked. A searing pain lit up the cut across my palm, and my lower legs felt like they were aflame, all the little knicks and scratches coming alive. I wailed in terror and climbed up onto my dressing table as the Girl crawled out of the closet on her hands and knees. Her swollen stomach dragged against the floor, pulling shards of glass along with it. Blood rushed out of her abdomen with every movement, splattering against the concrete floor. I recognized her naked body, her bruised skin and black fingers, her pained groans. The Girl looked up at me with Elena’s face, complete with wide eyes, sharp jaw, a freckle to the right of her lips. She reached out, and the lights shut off.
—
I stood onstage with Elena and the Girl. The spotlights above were so powerful they burned my skin, and I covered my eyes to shield them from the intensity. The Girl placed a cold hand around my wrist and guided it away from my face. With no other choice, I stared into the painful, virginal whiteness.
When my eyes finally adjusted, I realized the audience was gone. Maybe “gone” wasn’t a good word. They weren’t present. Instead of the rows and rows of velvet seats I expected to see before us, there was a floor-to-ceiling mirror onstage, reflecting us three. We were silent. Our bodies, once dripping in hot blood and sweat and tears, were clean, unharmed, and dressed in silver corsets and tulle. Our waists were lined in fluffy gray down. We wore no makeup.
Do you feel better? Elena asked after a few seconds, her voice as sweet and smooth as frosting on a cake. She placed a soothing hand on the back of my neck. Her fragile fingers laid without judgment along the pointed vertebrae of my spine.
Worse. Much worse, I said. My bare feet kicked at the dusty, gritty texture of the stage. I couldn’t confront them, let alone my own reflection.
“Look at us.” The Girl touched me too, so gently I could hardly feel it, with her hand on the small of my back. I didn’t say anything.
Look at us, Elena repeated. After a sniffle, I raised my head. All three of us stood in the middle of the stage, so small and finite, and they leaned on either side of me, as if they grew out from my body like wings. And look at you. What do you see?
A fat cunt, I said.
“Try again,” the Girl said, her lips so close to my ear that her words almost tickled. “Really look.”
I see a girl. Three girls, I said. Elena and the Girl nodded solemnly. Three sick girls.
Somewhere in the space behind the mirror, an orchestra began to play “Swan Theme,” delicately at first, then gradually swelling with passion and terror and fury as Elena and the Girl began to dance. They giggled and chirped as they leapt across the stage, and I stared, transfixed. Their bodies were imprecise, improvised, unrestrained but perfectly controlled.
Join us! Elena sang as she twirled across the stage.
I don’t know how, I responded. I wasn’t prepared, I hadn’t practiced, I didn’t know the choreography, I couldn’t—
“Just do it!” The Girl interrupted my thoughts. “Don’t think. Let yourself go!”
Although I flushed in premature embarrassment, I jumped into a jeté, as simple as sugar, and landed without so much as a stumble. Both girls applauded me as I gasped in delight. I grinned so hard the corners of my mouth ached. I swung my arms out and did my best to emulate the ballet performances I’d seen before. Then, tired of the imitations, I danced with the girls, my body finally uncontrolled. As the trumpets and horns blared, I jumped into the air once more, and for a moment, I was still, my limbs outstretched, my smile wide, like a bubble on the precipice of popping, weightless.
Author Bel Mercado (she/her) is a writer living in Fort Collins, Colorado. She is an associate editor for the Colorado Review and teaches first-year composition and creative writing at Colorado State University. She writes about what it means to be terrorized.
Artist Shane Allison (he/him) was bit by the writing bug at the age of fourteen. He spent a majority of his high school life shying away in the library behind desk cubicles writing bad love poems about boys he had crushes on. He has since gone on to publish five collections of poetry with Turbulent being his most recent from (Hysterical Books), and his book length poem, Remembered Men (Ranger Press). Shane’s collage work has graced the pages of Noisy Rain, Shampoo, Unlikely Stories, Pnpplzine.com, Palavar Arts Magazine, the Southeast Review, Postscript and a plethora of others. Allison is at work on a new novel, new poetry and is always at work making a collages and painting.
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