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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Dopabeane on 2024-11-25 20:13:35+00:00.

I can’t even write this girl’s history up right now. I literally can’t.

I don’t know how my boss thought it would be a good idea for me to talk to her, or why he’d think anything she said would make me feel better about anything or anyone.

The rest of her file will come later. Or maybe it won’t. I don’t know.

And right now I don’t care.

* * *

Interview Subject: The Cleanup Crew

Classification String:  Cooperative / Destructible / Khthonic / Constant / Moderate / Apeili

Interviewer: Rachele B.

Date: 11/25/2024

On the day I died, I was 5’5” and I weighed 80 pounds.

That was the worst thing ever because just a week prior, I had only weighed 79 pounds.

It can’t be, I assured myself, ignoring the panic gnawing the boundary of my consciousness. It’s wrong. It isn’t possible. You logged every gram of food, like you’re supposed to. You accounted for every fraction of a calorie, like you’re supposed to. You did everything, like you’re supposed to. You were in control. You are in control.

I stepped off the scale, then stepped back on.

This time, the number was even worse: 80.2.

A panic attack roared in. I was a failure. A weak, idiotic, disgusting failure with no self control. I stared at myself in the mirror, loathing every line and contour of my body and despising everything inside it until I burst into tears. I cried so hard it made me dizzy. Too dizzy to stand. Too dizzy to even sit. I lay down as sobs wracked my body, curling up on the bath mat as darkness shredded the edges of my vision. My chest felt so heavy, like someone had stacked a hundred bricks and plopped down on top of it. Nausea roiled in, slick and all-consuming.

I blacked out, then juddered back into consciousness on the living room floor, screaming as a paramedic slammed my sternum down again and again, crushing my heart, my lungs, my spine. The pain was so overwhelming I couldn’t move, couldn’t see, couldn’t even think. I could only feel pain exquisite in its profoundness, and a mindless, primal panic because I just knew that each compression was cracking my bones and rupturing my organs. 

I tried to shove him off, but I was too weak to even twitch. Pressure in my chest surged, flattening my lungs, and pain swallowed me again.

I woke up in a hospital.   

I remember the words my doctor used. Anemia. Critically low blood pressure. Bone loss. Kidney damage. Heart failure. 

The heart failure was why I’d gained weight— all the fluid built up because my own heart was too weak, too damaged, to cycle its own blood. 

“Can you cure it?” I asked.

“No. It’s treatable but irreversible.” He looked at me sadly. “I told you, Courtney. If you don’t eat, you’ll die. And you died.”

By the time they drained all the excess fluid, I weighed 72 pounds.

When I was finally discharged a month later, I weighed 89 pounds and had racked up a ninety-thousand dollar bill.

In my defense, I didn’t expect things to end that way.

Then again, there are a lot of things you don’t expect about eating disorders.

For one thing, you don’t expect the exhaustion. How your mind slows down, how even a full year into recovery you still trail off mid-conversation because your brain can’t pounce on the right words.

No one tells you how every waking moment (and most of your sleeping moments too) are consumed. How the only thing that makes you feel pride, the only thing that makes you feel hopeful, the only thing that makes you feel good, is meeting your restriction goals. 

No one tells you how good it feels when people lavish you with compliments, or how confusing and devastating it is when those compliments dry up. No one tells you that most people eventually stop talking to you. You definitely don’t believe the desperate friends who tell you that you’re not fat, you’re dying, and you only think you’re fat because your brain is so fucked it can’t see reality anymore.   

You don’t expect the stench, either. The ketone miasma smells like a cocktail of nail polish remover and blood, with a tantalizing note of cat piss.

You don’t expect what happens your teeth, how you’re lucky if it’s only your back molars that crumble. 

You don’t expect the scarring that impedes your ability to swallow solid food. No one tells you that your stomach might never stop hurting, even after you get better. No one tells you that you’ll sometimes get panic attacks when you take your acid reducer because the berry-flavored coating is sweet.

No one tells you how an eating disorder will turn you into an addict with everything addiction entails — the lying, the manipulation, the obsession, the ugliness, the destruction - only instead of alcohol or opioids or meth or fentanyl, deprivation is your drug. And no one tell you how people around you are okay with it up until the very end, because for some reason we all think self-deprivation is a virtue. I still think that sometimes.

No one tells you about heart failure. What it’s like to feel crushing pressure on your chest, to have lungs so impeded by fluid that they can’t expand enough to draw half a breath, or what it’s like when your heart stops, or how it feels to have a frantic EMT crush your sternum and crack your ribs to restart your dead heart.

And no one tells you about the time you lose.

I was sick for four years. Years that somehow feel like a fever dream and realer than real at the same time.  Years that mired me in place while everyone and everything I cared about left me behind.

But all of these things I didn’t expect happened in the middle of this story. The middle is the least important part. Now I’m going to tell you the beginning.

My big sister Carissa was the best person in the world.

She adopted two ancient mutts and sang lullabies to them every night. She made friends with the crows who lived in the courtyard behind our apartment and taught them to say my name. She donated money to food banks and animal shelters, and cried at TV commercials, and volunteered at Big Brothers Big Sisters until they found out what she did for a living. Even after they banned her, the girls she worked with came to her on their own. When our mom kicked me out, she drove over before I’d even made it down the street and took me to live with her. Didn’t charge me a dime. Didn’t even ask me to buy groceries or pay the water bill. 

I was jealous of her. Desperately jealous. I hated myself for it. I still do. I was a short, fat little wallflower who couldn’t get a second glance from anyone. No one talks about that, either. They talk about unrequited crushes, and the beauty industrial complex, and how pretty women get better jobs and make more money. But they don’t ever talk about how it feels. They don’t talk about that wild, sinking pit that comes with the realization that no one sees you. The despair when you understand you might as well not exist. 

Carissa had none of those problems. And I was glad. I didn’t want anyone to feel like me, least of all her. 

But I was still jealous.

One night after dinner, I realized I was way too full. And I didn’t like the way that felt. I looked across the table and saw my sister, looking beautiful. So beautiful that I felt jealous. I didn’t like the way that felt, either.

That was the night it started. From there, I launched headlong into my diet.

Carissa was my biggest supporter. She supported me in everything I did. Why would a diet be any different? She was my foundation. My accountability partner. My guiding light. That was what Carissa was at her core: Light. She didn’t brighten every room she walked into. She was too wild for that. So bright and so wild that whenever she walked into a room she burned it down. 

Men loved that about her, at least at first. Nick did for sure. 

Nick owned her club. He wasn’t her boss — too high up for that — but he had the final say in everything, especially the girls. 

That brings me to the last, least important thing about my sister:

She was a stripper.

I know that’s a shitty word. I know there are better descriptors. Exotic dancer, or just dancer. But Carissa chose and claimed the title of Stripper (specifically, the Best Damn Stripper in the Armpit of California) for herself, so that is what I’ll call her.

To me, Nick started off as some distant, vaguely threatening background character in Carissa’s rants about work. But it didn’t take long for that to change. For Nick to notice how bright she shone. How everything burned in her wake. 

I knew they were dating before she told me. What I didn’t know was that dating Nick came with expectations. Bad expectations. Expectations that terrified her. So she broke it off.

He killed her for it, and he got away with it.

I was at work the night it happened. She called me at the end of my shift, screaming. Don’t come home. Courtney! Whatever you do, do not come home! And then I heard a crash in the background, and her dogs barking, and voices. And laughter.

And then she ended the call.

I didn’t listen. I went home immediately.

By the time I turned onto our street, firetrucks were there and the parking lot was barricaded. Our apartment window faced the road. It was wide open, and full of fire. An upside down waterfall of flame rippling up into the night.

She managed, somehow, to get her dogs out of the apartment. Our neighbor found them on the landing, howling and wailing at the door. I kept those dogs until they died. I sang them lullabies every night, just like she did. 

The…

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