At first it was just to have something to do.
One morning, I was sat at the kitchen table and wondered what the slice of bread in my hand meant in numbers.
I translated it into a ‘120’ and after some time the bread stopped being bread and became just that. And it stayed that way for a while.
I made other translations, too, because I like numbers; the universe is made of them. Also, they are straightforward and never ambiguous, and that’s reassuring.
I translated the glass of orange juice, I translated bananas, big and tiny ones; I translated two slices of cheese and half a chocolate bar, and quickly found that some things had smaller numbers than others and that if you added them, you got smaller numbers still compared to the added other things with the bigger numbers. Those bigger numbers were becoming scary and scarier because they could spiral out of control so easily without you even noticing and then they could change things. They could change you.
They were quite conniving, too, because they hid in unassuming small things like oil and nuts so that there’d be big numbers for minuscule things and I didn’t like that, it didn’t add up.
So, I mistrusted great numbers and I still do, I suppose; how to control infinity?
The smaller numbers, however, they were my allies, my accomplices. Sometimes my friends, even, because they were honest and they allowed me to have more things than those treacherous minuscule things with the bigger numbers. They were easy to keep track of and not complicated at all. Like a framed painting. It was maths and philosophy and art. I felt that tending to my smaller numbers, turning them over, stacking and subtracting them, it kept my mind awake and interested. It was stimulating. I had something to do and I was good at it and I didn’t need anything or anyone.
Then it was about control.
I noticed how I could run on lower fuel. I liked how clearly that made me think and how swiftly it made me move. Hunger wasn’t that nagging, scorching sensation in the pit of my stomach anymore. It was cooling and exhilarating. It was power.
I liked that I was disappearing. I liked that there was less and less of me every day. It was a slow and exhausting decline and I’d earned every bit of it. In a way, I was becoming like my friends. It was beautiful. I was untouchable. I was simply in my mind.
Then a friend of mine, one with an actual body and hands and fingers in space and time, wrote me a letter because she didn’t know what else to do, and I read it and hated it. And I hated her for making me hate her. I stopped being her friend. I stopped being a many people’s friend. Daughter. Sister. Love. I wanted it that way. It was just me and my numbers and we got along. I could always tell what they would be next and they never made me feel alone because they never left me alone.
I would sit on my bed, doing my translations and calculations in my head, and oftentimes — it got more frequent as time went by — I have to admit the sums I arrived at disturbed me deeply and I had to retranslate and recalculate just to make sure, but the numbers kept getting bigger and bigger, to me at least, and I realised I was no longer content with the smaller numbers. I was heading for the ultimate perfect quantity which was empty. The small infinity that meant naught. This ought to be light, I surmised; the lightest. Uncomplicated. Pure. I was obsessed with purity and I’m not sure even now I wholly understand what it was to me back then.
Soon after that epiphany, however, it was either eating or the clinic or death for me because, apparently, after some time, without enough food and only small numbers to ingest into your mind, the heart starts failing.
The first two were no options, obviously, and the third one I was indifferent to as long as it didn’t interfere with what I liked and lived to do and that was translating. However, after a glass of water — another beautiful zero — I realised that death would be a bit too final for me and that I wouldn’t be able to continue as usual in the event of it, so I knew I had to become imaginative.
I asked for help and did as they said just the right amount so they’d bugger off and get off my case. Then I could start my translations again in peace. Someone who’d believed he’d known me once said that I was good at deception because I never talk much. I hadn’t understood how that could be, but I did when they started paying attention to me, trying to distract me and meddle with my brain so that I’d lose track of the numbers. If you didn’t talk, the other person would do all the deception themselves because people liked to see what they want so I stayed silent and did as told because that had always worked before and this wouldn’t be any different. I knew I’d stay loyal to my numbers until the end despite the temporary betrayal because they had always been loyal to me.
Still it was hard, I am not going to embellish it, but I kept picturing crawling my way back to weightless nothingness and that’s what made me choke down that slice of toast, those spoons of porridge. The prospect of freedom was just within reach and I had to think strategically; mathematically. This I could work with.
People began telling me I was doing better, that I was so strong, but all I saw when they cooed and gushed like that, was a drunk captain on a beheaded ship. Their praise meant I was losing control. That I had fooled myself into believing I was cunning enough to fool them, and now here I was, doing what they wanted me to, getting fat and stupid and weak. Betraying my numbers, too. It doomed me because traitors had no reflection, only looming shadows and ghosts wherever they went. I didn’t know where to go anymore. I closed my eyes when I passed polished cars or shiny shop windows. When my mother threw away my old clothes, I fished my jeans out of the litter box and cradled them like a mourning mother would cradle her stillborn. I ate and cried and laughed and paced rooms for hours on end, repeating to myself how it was okay again and again, how it would be okay soon again. How it was all part of the plan and how soon I’d be better again. I just had to find my strength. It had to still be somewhere in there, they couldn’t have taken it away with their talks of self-love and accepting limited agency within this whole mess that is existence.
It was unnerving, absurd, laughable —
how people kept on telling me I was doing better in the middle of all of this. I didn’t believe them one word, of course. They were just glad I had started functioning again and stopped looking like a walking corpse. It had reminded them.
I thought back with longing on the days spent running solely on fruit and tea. How strong my will used to be back then to accomplish real achievements to be proud of, not whatever the fuck this was. There was a beautifully haunted divinity in saying ‘no’ and being carved out from within.
It is true, I was acting like a heartbroken fool. There was an ache in me where my numbers had used to be, but I couldn’t hear them anymore. When I talked to them, they wouldn’t listen. I could feel their silence. I was a heathen who had forsaken her master and my punishment was mediocrity. An ever-present sense of something missing. Imperfection. Incompletion.
I tried to tell this to my applauding audience because they’d always urge me to, but they wouldn’t listen. Instead, they took away my numbers to count the voices in my head and insisted it hadn’t been me speaking the whole time. Or counting, translating; it’s those evil voices.
They kept telling me how I shouldn’t listen to them, how they were all bad and against me, but they were also part of me, so that meant I was bad, didn’t it? And I was missing the bad part of me so dearly, it made me hold onto my heart at night, that wretched, pumping thing.
So this is how it is now: I repulse myself and numbers frighten me. They are still too big, but there’s nothing I can do about it anymore. They never mean two things at the same time and that’s also what makes them so cruel.
