Breath is the tool for uniting the body and the mind.
Chinese traditional medicine calls the energy that circulates in your body chi—which means breath. When you breathe, you’re literally sucking in life force, the flow of which sustains all living things. Sophisticated sages can draw great strength and nourishment from the air. And air has no calories. Master martial artists are said to be able to control the flow of chi through their bodies, and even project it out of their bodies to heal or to harm.
DAY: 10
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1000
Hunger stretched out time, made me move faster without realizing it, made me seem manic and mad while, inside, I sat patiently in a bubble of calm. Words came out jangly and overflowing; sentences doubled up and intertwined.
The tater tots taught me early on how losing focus for even a second made my mind waver from its goal, left me defenseless against my body’s base and fleshy needs. My mind, it seemed, needed to grow stronger along with my senses.
At school I made myself sit and be still. I ignored my classmates, the words and emotions they disturbed the universe with, the stink of their bodies and their unwashed clothes and their hormones crackling in the air like popping corn. I could see now that I wasn’t universally hated, the way I’d imagined I was. Apathy, sweet and dull as gasoline, was the smell that came off most of them. And the hate of the actual homophobes had lost its sting, their coiled violence and cocked fists had ceased to frighten me.
Mostly.
Mostly I felt strong and unstoppable. Better than everyone. Superhuman.
But those moments still came. The ones where I caught someone staring, and shriveled inside. Where I saw my own reflection unexpectedly, and gasped with horror at the ugliness of it. When I felt weak and doomed. Subhuman.
You’re wondering, how is that possible, Matt? How can you be both sub- and superhuman?
That’s one of the more infuriating bugs in the human software. You can have two ideas that are total opposites and believe them both completely.
Of course, I ate. I couldn’t just starve myself. Not yet, anyway. But I ate very little, and every day I ate less.
When your body has passed a certain hunger threshold, food becomes the only thing you can focus on. The only thing you can think about. Pains pop up in the strangest places. Joints creak and scream, and their screaming sounds like the names of food. Very little is truly frightening, because you have learned the identity of your true worst enemy. And, spoiler alert: it’s you.
More than once, I spat out a strip of raw pink bleeding skin I’d unthinkingly torn away from a fingernail. So, another important thing to know about hunger: it can drive you into mild fugue states of self-cannibalism.
I sat, and I listened. I smelled. Did people know, looking at me, that I was transforming from a helpless sissy into something unspeakably powerful? I could barely see them, my peers, the people whose respect I once craved, the people whose hate I once dreaded.
At home, I kept researching.
Online I read about food developed by cultures with severely limited resources, and found tsampa. Tibetan roasted barley flour. Mountain food. Sherpas and yak herders take it with them on long journeys. Maximum nutrition, minimum space. Eat ten tablespoons a day—about 800 calories—and you should be able to keep your hunger in check. Keep the body alive. I found a place that shipped to Hudson, and put two ten pound bags on my mom’s debit card.
I clicked from Wikipedia to pornography. I watched superhuman torsos writhe and flail and grapple. Chiseled manly faces clenched in pain and pleasure. My stomach, angry at being ignored, clenched so tight I gasped. Black stars flashed in the air all around me, spiral galaxies of brain cells dying.
I stood up and collapsed.
I don’t think I was out for very long. If I was out at all.
The human body can go for up to thirty days without eating, I told myself over and over.
I was fine.
I was fine.