Blue: A Short Story

BY FARHIRA FARUDIN

I already had in mind that today was going to be just like any other day for me. There would be no tiny alteration nor a massive abruption, it would only go like a normal day to me but out-of-this-world abnormal to everybody else. Sometimes I felt numb to this perpetual torture I’ve been dealing with for a long time. When he asked me if I was feeling okay, I didn’t answer. The only form of reciprocation I could give him was the random scribbles I had in my notebook, which I was sure that he didn’t understand any of it. Neither did I.

I looked down to the sketches of people I’ve drawn; they all are scribbled with a blue pen. In the corner of the page, I drew the back of a girl in front of the class, she now has blue hair thanks to me. I drew little blue circles surrounding a bigger blue circle, and I have tried many times to decipher the sketches and the reasons I drew them in the first place, but akin to what my sickness has done to me, it is all nothing but a pointless trajectory.

The colour blue is often linked with sadness, but perchance by labelling how I feel as of now with blue would be misguided because blue does not and never represent the colour of my emptiness nor my illness. Blue is calm like the surface of the sea, while how I feel every day is similar to the loneliness of undiscovered creatures living on the ocean floor. Blue is as soft as the 8 am sky acting as the nuances between white puffy clouds, but how I’ve been doing so far is like a small star in our hollow dark universe trying to find the mere purpose of its existence.

But I like blue. Colours play a major part in how I see the world, and blue represents beauty I could never hold between my hands, but its tangible warmth I get every time I see the shades of it is the reason why blue shouldn’t be the colour of sadness. But if my daily mood is decided by the world to be blue then I’ll go for blue.

I came home feeling hungry. My fists are clenched, fighting myself whether I should eat or not. Eating would be a battle I’d regret raising the sword first, and not eating would cause a war I did not intend to start between my mind and my body.

I had decided to eat.

Since I am dead achromatic inside, everything outside has to be coloured and matched, and this includes the colour of my food. If a green apple looks dull with brown patches all over it, I’d take the longest time on contemplating whether I should eat it or not. When I have reached the state of tranquillity and finally wants to eat the damn apple, my mind would ask me to reconsider my option. Occasionally, and this rarely happens, I couldn’t even eat food with colours that I feel clashed with whatever I was wearing at that time. If I was wearing a purple shirt, then my food has to be purple in colour. It can’t be a plate of white rice, it can’t be a golden brown fried chicken. It can’t be anything else but purple. Most of the time, my sickness would win and I would go to bed and sleep, dreaming my eating disorder would go away by itself.

So far my dream remains a dream.

I walked towards the fridge. My mother posted a yellow note on the door, she mentioned my next appointment with my shrink and will fetch me soon. Her sloppy handwriting tells how she was in a rush to go to work. I glanced at the note and opened the fridge. Nothing inside captured my interest but I know I had to eat or else my mother would make me see my shrink more often than I wanted to. 

She noticed my strange eating habits ever since I was fourteen. I didn’t know why, but I remember waking up early morning and asked for grey coloured food. My request was specific, and because it was too specific, she thought I was kidding and served me with cereal. I pushed the bowl away, demanding for whatever food in the colour of grey. I recalled the word ‘grey’ repeatedly whispered inside my head, and it irritated me that I couldn’t cease the almost unheard whispers. It wouldn’t stop until my request was fulfilled. That day, I ended up eating mushrooms for breakfast and dinner. It was a Tuesday.

The following day I demanded red. Red was easy. Red was understandable.

On Thursday, my mind had decided to skip the madness. I was fine. Friday, I was insane again. My mother continuously denied my insanity and chose to succumb to my illness. She let my illness get what it has always wanted from the both of us. A total control of our lives.

Until my mother had enough of it.

 “If you make me eat that apple, I’m going to die,” I told her.

“You’re not going to die. You’re going to be fine.”

“You don’t get it.”

“I don’t.”

We both stood in silence.

“Eat it.”

“I’m wearing pink. That apple is green.”

“You did this on purpose.”

Did I?

“This is all a game to you, isn’t it?”

I’ve never seen her that angry before. When she grabbed my wrist, I knew she was never going to let it go until I eat in front of her. My mother was teaching me how to eat again, except this time around I wasn’t a one-year-old girl, I was 17.

 “Stop!” I cried to her repeatedly. “You don’t understand.”

She didn’t listen.

At that point, I hadn’t eaten anything for five days straight. That moment marked as the archetype for my awful state of mental health to be fully in charge of my body. Maybe my mother was right. Perhaps I was doing this, whatever kind of torture this is, to myself on purpose. In fact, I had been wearing the same purple shirt for a week. I was certainly giving up on myself.

I emplaced myself on the floor while crying. I felt like an innocent child throwing tantrums at my parent because she’s not giving me what I want. The loud cries I exuded due to exhaustion drowned my mother’s voice. I couldn’t hear what she was yelling about. I could only catch a few words but the rest were all blur. She continued yelling until I passed out. And I voluntarily begin my first appointment at the general hospital the following day.

That particular episode plays inside my head repeatedly every time I refused to help myself and just fucking eat. The colour for today was blue. I sighed at the sight of an almost empty fridge. The lack of choices in here isn’t helping me at all. I grabbed a Mars bar and slowly, I tear apart the wrapper. 

I need to consume this chocolate bar, even if the sticky and supposedly appetizing brown surface looks disgusting to me.

I looked down to my clothes. Yellow. I stared at the Mars bar. Brown. And I repeated this process.

My pale hand, half covered with my soft yellow sweater, is holding a dark brown candy bar half wrapped in a darker tone plastic sheet. Brown and yellow. If this moment is captured as a movie scene, it would be an aesthetically pleasing one.

But the reality is far from that.

I recited a chant inside my head to slow down the agonizing process of eating.

My eating habit is an excuse.

My eating habit is a lie.

My messed up way of eating is not real.

The tumultuous chant inside my head is equivalent to a morning prayer.

People pray before they eat because the food is considered as a blessing from God.

I pray before I eat so I could survive the process of eating, which to me more or less is equivalent to dying.

I closed my eyes and shove the bar inside my trembling mouth.

When it touched my lips, it felt cold.

It tasted awful. I don’t remember a chocolate bar tastes this bad. The taste jammed inside my mouth and I couldn’t swallow it. I dug out the remaining of the chocolate bar from my mouth before I choked. I threw the bar away, I didn’t want to see it near me.

This is so exhausting. I felt emotionally drained. I didn’t realise I was crying. I chose to take a nap with my growling stomach. I was desperate for a rest. My next appointment is at four. My mother will be here anytime soon.