The Alphabet Experiment

Anorexic Angie lay on her stomach, her arms dangling listlessly over the edge of the bed. Better days had come and past—to love and have loved, she supposed—and now, she was left with this vacant feeling. Cause and effect—there were so many things she could’ve done differently. Did she even know what it was to care about someone enough to call that feeling “love?” Ever since the day he gave her his jacket one cold Monday, her life had spun into a whirlwind of mismatched couple-hood. Finding her way out of the tangles he left in his wake…well, that was another story.

Gradually, the pain had found a home away from heart and into her head where it churned and squirmed and never let her rest. How could one person have done so much damage? If she hadn’t been so weak, so dependent on him to make her believe that she was worth something… Just maybe, she wouldn’t have fallen into this pit of eternal starvation. Kamikaze emotions sliced through her mind as she remembered how he looked at her so gently and told her everything would be okay. “Like anything he said was ever true,” she muttered to no one in particular.

Mondays used to be her favorite days back when they were together, like a weekly celebration of how they met. Now, it was like a perpetual ghost, floating silently behind her as she went through her everyday actions. Out of the corner of her eye, Anorexic Angie saw her old records, never touched for so many months.

Perhaps it was the right time, the moment when that hateful clock inside of her finally stopped, perhaps it was the wrong time, and she still needed something to break the noise inside her skull. Questions aside, she sat up and pulled the records towards her, sifting through the first few albums she grabbed until she came upon just the right one. Rachmaninoff would comfort her during these violent moments of emotion, and as the music swelled up to a crescendo, she felt her insides soaring up with it. Suddenly, she wasn’t alone. Tonight, she would sleep with the sound of a symphony serenading her to slumber. Usually, such moments of peace were impossible to find; very often, they’d transform back into the bitter taste that she tried to forget. What made tonight any different? Xanthippe that she was, she could still sense that the darkness was not yet gone from her insides. Yet, there was something about the way the music swept through the room that made her feel full again. Zoetic emotion washed over her as she fell backwards onto her bed and closed her eyes, pulled into the ocean of sound that rocked her to a wordless peace.