Last night, my toothpaste betrayed me.
Ha ha ha, thats right.
You know, I was suprised. I thought that it was one of the last things I could rely on. The only thing I could rely on.
This probably doesn’t make any sense, so let me try to explain..
I’ve always been a neat person.
And that was the understatement of the year.
I also always blame my problems on other people, so I guess I can hand this one to my parents. My parents were perfect. Held hands, had friends..
You would never have been able to tell.
Behind the smiles, mom was an alchoholic. Dad tried to fix her.
Pleading her didnt work. Neither did hitting her.
I guess he figured that if he took it away, she would just.. stop.
After he found her stash under the sink, things were never the same.
Dad always did his best to fix things. If it wasn't fixable, then it was dirty.
Some mornings I would wake up, almost as if I didn't remember. Then I would smell the rubbing alchohol on my pillow, and wish I hadn't even gotten up.
One day, he finally got sick of it and just left. It was a sunny thursday morning, I had just woken up, and he was gone. The second week of my freshman year.
Mom went through depression, first blaming him, then us, then finally herself.
After she joined a support group, I thought that things were really going to be okay.
Truth was, they just went to the opposite extreme.
Figuring it was her fault, she tried to be what he had wanted her to be. She started wearing makeup again, and took up knitting.
When he wouldn’t come back, she began to frantically search for the reason. What was still missing? She had fixed everything, hadn’t she?
I guess she decided that we were the problem. He didn’t want children like us. So dirty.
Like I said, I’ve always been neat. It was harder on my sister, Sidney. Mom started calling her fat and lazy, telling her stories of girls who lived in trailer parks and leaving tapes around the house of jerry springer videos.
Sidney moved in with a friend. Now that I think of it, I haven’t seen her since then.
I loved my mother, I really did. I guess it wasn’t enough. It always has to be somebody else’s fault, doesn’t it?
You would have figured I would be used to the treatement, listening to my sister crying while mom screamed at her.
No control.
I started fantasizing about our family before, how we had been. I spent my schooldays like this..
Whatever they were teaching seemed worthless in comparison.
One day, after staying up all night the day before, I was very tired when I got home from school. The homework was a joke, and I opted for sleep instead.
I woke up hungry and late, and around 11am, I had an extremely intruiging thought.
I wonder how long I could go without eating?
Ha ha. You see? At first, it was just a game I would play with myself, kind of like those fantasies I made up to keep myself occupied.
I mean, I wasn’t having sex or doing drugs or anything. I wasn’t crazy or anything.
It was just a game at first, one I didn’t really think about. Dad called mom the afternoon of that day. Mom was so happy, when she saw me, she called me her beautiful daughter.
I had only skipped one day of eating, so I probably didn’t look much different, but I felt, somehow, that I had helped to contribute to the perfect life we might just win back.
I’ve always been a neat person.
Even when I wouldn’t allow myself to taste the food, and when the water seemed to slide out of me as smoothly as it went in, I still had my clean.
Shampoo and soap taste disgusting. You know that. You’ve known that since you were a little kid.
...But I’ve always loved the sharp minty flavor of toothpaste. So clean.
And even better, it helped me with the guilt of when I did eat. It was like an erase button on your mouth. I just wanted an erase button on my life, but this was as close as I could get.
Even when the other foods started to hurt, my toothpaste just got stronger, cleansing me from the inside, as if Mr. Arm And Hammer was saying “Thats The Way! I’m Here For You!” He just got stronger, all for me.
Ha ha ha.
I’ve always wanted to be clean.
Thats why, last night, after a long day, when I began to brush my beloved toothpaste, and when my throat started burning, and when the toothpaste on the floor no longer looked like itself, stained by stomach acid and blood...
I felt like clean rejected me.
My toothpaste betrayed me last night.