CW: Disordered Eating/Body Image
The difference between fasting and starving is context. Context refers to the texture of that which is woven together. Years in the making. As a child I dreamed of weaving challah braid by braid to diamond-crusted egg-beaten beauty. This, from the first moment at my grandmother’s house, when I learned how bread could big me unexpected ways. I put on makeup in her bathroom and set out to eat, my context humming, warm, smelling of cheese and chips. We watched Survivor, saw irony to pieces. The longer they survived, the whittler they got. Mens’ stomaches sank beneath their hip bones. Women hunched above their coconuts, prey to break next-fast fish-flesh. In this context, survive means the getting some guts with a spear. And hyponatremia.
Sarah Cavar is a PhD student, writer, and critically Mad transgender-about-town, and serves as Managing Editor at Stone of Madness Press. Author of two chapbooks, A HOLE WALKED IN (Sword & Kettle Press) and THE DREAM JOURNALS (giallo lit), they have also had work in Electric Literature, The Offing, Bitch Magazine, and elsewhere. Cavar navel-gazes at cavar.club and tweets @cavarsarah.