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I.

I try to write about constipation and it turns into something about my mother. Okay. She used to give me enemas, in all those years when my body refused to empty itself. My mother is a nurse. This wasn’t even close to her threshold for gross. She used to have to stick her fingers in strangers’ buttholes in the ICU, hook them around what was stuck, and yank it out. A friend with similar gut issues to me says it’s very possible to give yourself an enema but I could never do it, I couldn’t get my fingers to cooperate around the bottle when I told them squeeze squeeze squeeze release, couldn’t convince my digestive tract to swallow the saline in this backwards way. My mother is the body whisperer. She is convincing in her kindness. I made her leave while I simmered, though, because that kind of anticipation felt so private. Called her back when I was done, and we were both disappointed. Always seemed like there should have been more.

Before my cat died he’d sometimes join me for my enemas, curling up in the cave of my body between stomach and bent right knee while I waited. I was afraid to push him away in case something leaked with movement.

Sometimes I lie like this after sex. On my left side, right knee bent, a man’s pelvis and thigh cradling my points of entry and exit.

I ask my mom if we could go through the filofax she used to bring to my doctors’ appointments and she comes back with a stack of binders I haven’t seen before, or maybe just don’t remember. Those years are largely fuzz for me now. Food sensitivity tests, thyroid labs, comprehensive blood panels, appointment notes, psych evals, hearty packets of research. Scientific evidence backing the weird holistic protocols I followed. Look at all this stuff, she says. There’s so much here on Beta Glucuronidase. Naltrexone, remember that? I ask when she had time to do all this. She says probably while she was supposed to be working.

I see a lot of myself in my mother’s sister. She keeps a buttfolio with candid photos she’s taken of her loved ones from behind. She can’t poop, either. Has found some relief through acupuncture. When she was younger, she dated the man who would become my least favorite high school teacher. Now she’s been married four times, most recently to a man who shares her same name. She is either really good at love or doesn’t know what it is.

My mother’s sister’s son was so quotable as a child. We’d ask why’d the chicken cross the road? and he’d say to get some poop! He used to projectile vomit whenever he laughed too hard.

In the binders, she’s kept my body’s timelines. January 2009. Had severe episode of hyperventilation during basketball practice (Anxiety? Asthma?). April 24, 2009. Abdominal

ultrasound and X-ray done due to continued constipation and abdominal pain—Normal findings. Summer 2009. Began menstruating.

There’s an index card tucked into one of the folders. Mitochondrial dysfunction—MUST FIX.

Back then I puked spontaneously and blacked out when I got startled or when I stood up. And I slept too much. All this in the binders. I couldn’t keep my eyes open in class, in the car, in the waiting room, on the toilet, walking down the hall, slumped up against the lockers.

Sometimes now I black out and puke on purpose. Another glass of wine and I won’t remember calling him. Another slice of bread and the rest of it will come up softer.

My mom has never been satisfied with half-answers. She says IBS is a garbage diagnosis.

Freshman year of college, I collected my own stool samples in the communal bathroom of my residence hall. This involved releasing my bowels into a cardboard tray, much like one you’d eat french fries out of at a carnival. And the mini collection spoons, like you’d use to sample frozen yogurt. Scoop material from various regions of the stool sample into color-coded test tubes, then shake vigorously for fifteen seconds to mix it with the liquid preservative. Do NOT forget to tighten the cap. Store the test in a biohazard bag in your dorm room mini fridge until you can get to a FedEx.

I watched a YouTube video demonstrating how to submit a stool sample to the Minnesota Department of Health. It opens like a porno. Hannah, AJ, and Victor introduce themselves as Team Diarrhea and stand too close to each other in a public restroom. Hannah says, All right AJ, here’s the kit to collect your stool specimen. Are you ready to do it? AJ is enthusiastic about following instructions.

March—April—May 2013. Required very strict high-protein, low carb diet to control symptoms of hypoglycemia. Exercise-induced asthma very problematic during soccer season with chest tightness/coughing/shortness of breath. Between EIA and hypoglycemic symptoms, soccer season was very, very difficult.

In one of my mom’s folders, there’s a comprehensive write up of a neurocognitive assessment I had done when I was twelve. What did I have to be so anxious about, then? Life had hardly even happened to me.

Ms. Alberta reported that Chloe took her dosage of MiraLAX that morning. Her appetite was described as ‘okay.’ Problems with abdominal pain cause her to be careful not to overeat and be somewhat focused on her food. She does not particularly like change.

The food anxiety isn’t noted in my mom’s timeline. The middle school weight loss, the paleness, the compulsive pinching at the skin of my thighs. It’s not really in the binders at all, except one note, hand written: ? eating as a trigger. I remember she used to ply me with full fat milkshakes after volleyball practice, when all I wanted was a banana. A single piece of toast.

Some things we tried: the nothing taste of MiraLAX. Years and years of that daily nothing taste. Oily medium-chain triglycerides in my coffee. Tablespoons of pure flaxseed oil—gross.

Metamucil powder—gross, orange. Metamucil cookies—not bad. Glycerin suppositories. Lauricidin, which I swallowed with meals in a scoop of dry white pellets. Low dose Naltrexone, for gut inflammation, though at higher doses it’s prescribed to temper the urges of recovering addicts. I would do anything my mom suggested. She brought her filofax to my appointments and pitched solutions to my doctors, she woke me up in the mornings, tipping water into my mouth while I did my calf raises, urging my blood to circulate. I’ve been doing some research, she’d say, and what she meant was, I love you.

I spent the week before my seventeenth birthday at Mayo Clinic. The butt doctor introduced himself as such. From my mom’s notes: 2-day session — what are we missing?

The mutated gene is called MTHFR. It has something to do with methylating B vitamins, which has something to do with converting amino acids to proteins, which has something to do with why I couldn’t stay awake. The dysfunction underproduces an enzyme called methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase, but I have never and will never attempt to pronounce it.

MTHFR. I know, my doctor said. It looks like motherfucker.

When we go through the binders, my mother tells me this marker here indicated a high likelihood of colon cancer if we hadn’t gotten the gut situation under control. I ask why she never mentioned this. She thought I had enough to worry about.

For a job application, I asked my best friend what’s the most interesting thing about me. She said, Probably your intestinal yeast.

They put a balloon in my asshole and inflated it, and watched my insides to see what they’d do. They fed me radioactive eggs and watched my insides to see what they’d do. They gave me a curdled drink that tasted like thick hairy milk. Put me on a disinfected pedestal, leaned me

forty-five degrees back, told me to shit it all out in this clear, rustling bag. Watched my insides to see what they’d do.

In the Wooster Group’s adaptation of Rancine’s dramatic tragedy, Queen Phèdre’s anxious passions for her stepson wreaks havoc on her insides until she can’t care for herself, can’t perform the basic requirements of life. Can’t dress herself. Can’t tell Hippolyte she loves him. She’s wheeled around stage on a toilet while assistants administer her enemas.

My mother came to every appointment. Touched me on the shoulder when I couldn’t stay awake in the waiting room. I don’t know how she got away from work so much, and I never asked, never questioned it until years later. I know she cares more about me than I care about myself.

My best friend started getting dizzy around the same time I did. Everyone thought that was a strange coincidence. She puked a lot too, spontaneously, she was so self-conscious about it. One time she dropped me off at my parent’s house then puked in my yard for half an hour before I realized she hadn’t gone home.

My mother became well known, locally, for her research. The unofficial diagnoser of any girl in my hometown who passed out too often. It had to do with hearts, and floppy veins, and Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. Women she knew from high school called, saying my daughter is . My daughter cannot . What should I do?

My best friend poops when she’s nervous, so her moments of urgency are often inopportune. While we’re boarding an airplane. Or right before her wedding. And with all that lace.

II.

We called the bacterial phenomenon my alien baby. It happened a lot when I lived in New York after college. It really looked like something was gestating in there—hard and round and protruding. I sent maternity selfies to people who’d seen me naked before. Look at my beautiful baby girl, I’d say. Look at my sweet little infestation.

Janine Lindemulder, the nurse on the cover of Blink-182’s Enema of the State album, was married to Jesse James for a while. He left her for Sandra Bullock when Lindemulder was seven months pregnant. In 2006 the X-Rated Critics Organization named her MILF of the Year. Then she spent some time in prison for tax evasion.

Me and a couple of friends have a group chat called GI Janes, where we send links to new probiotics and update each other when we poop, or when we have godawful gas and we’re

trapped on a bus with dozens of unwitting victims. Matt has Crohn’s Disease, so his issue is often too much poop. My issue is not enough. Mal’s is a little bit of everything. Her stuff is more complicated than mine, because it got really bad when she was already an adult, when everything is more complicated. She texts my mom a lot for advice.

Diet—nuts, legumes, soy—all feed the bacteria!

Ninety-five percent of the body’s serotonin is produced in the gut. Happiness is fuzzy with fecal matter.

Some things we’ve tried: Lexapro. Cymbalta. Family therapy. Individual therapy. Supplemental thyroid medication. Zoloft. A delightful psychiatrist who looked like Santa Claus. A creepy psychiatrist who operated out of an attic and told me I had control issues. He wasn’t wrong. But he was so creepy. Prozac.

I keep a Vera Bradley duffel bag full of my vitamins and minerals. My mom has kept all the supplement lists she’s ever printed out, sometimes organized by which doctor recommended them, sometimes organized by what they’re meant to help. Gut, brain, miscellaneous. My broken areas. On some lists there’s a section of my mom’s own additions, to be double checked by people with more letters behind their name. But they always said sure, why don’t we try it. I think they were probably relieved to not have to come up with something themselves.

A woman named Carol stuck electrical leads to my forehead and temples and the base of my skull. She hooked me up to a monitor that translated brain waves into a display of colors that twisted, spun, contracted like a screen saver. There would be blips in the continuity of the colors and the music—classical piano, punctuated by bird sounds and light rain. These were nudges to let my brain know something was wrong in that particular spot. The idea was that then my brain could fix itself. The first step in healing is recognizing the problem.

Carol said gouging out my pimples with my fingernails like that counts as self-harm.

The GI Janes are all chronically depressed. Matt sends me songs to listen to while lying on the floor. Mal says she’s going to get us framed prints of the Bristol stool chart for Christmas.

The butt doctor sent me to a quiet empty wing of the hospital where a quiet empty woman named Harmony or Melody or Allegra or something tapped different parts of me with her pianist’s fingers, tapped over my liver, stomach sac, both sizes of intestine, especially where the big one rested, full, in the cradle of my pelvis. Tapped in places that would make me flinch if she were a man. The tapping released something in me, but not what I’d hoped. My mom said, Isn’t the brain-gut connection amazing? I had panic attacks for three days straight.

Real people keep getting tattoos of the symbol the little boy types into a sex chat in the Miranda July movie Me and You and Everyone We Know. ))<>((. It means, I’ll poop in your butthole and you’ll poop it back into my butt, and we will keep doing it. Back and forth. With the same poop. Forever. The woman who wants this more than anything waits on a park bench next to the little

boy. Kisses him on the mouth when she realizes who he is. Walks away with nothing. People with the tattoo explain the symbol with words like intimacy, reciprocity, innocence. Infinity. To me, it seems lonely.

A boy I slept with a couple times told me my digestive issues freak him out. I said then you probably don’t want to stick your finger in there.

Once a week I pull out my duffel bag and drop my pills in their proper slots. Orange organizer for morning, green for afternoon, blue for night. Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday. Big pharma gives me colored capsules, but besides that most of the pills look the same. White powder packed into oblong casings, like cocoons.

My best friend and I went to Florence and ate bad beans at a hostel buffet. They did their damage swiftly and without mercy. They turned our stomachs inside out. There was only one bathroom in our room so we had to take turns sprinting down to the lobby because our twisting bowels synched up—when the urge moved one of us, it moved the other. We spent the whole night in opposite bathrooms, texting each other things like Holy Fucking Shit and Jesus Fucking Christ. That was the summer after she got engaged. I’d worried, until the food poisoning, that I would lose the little part of her that belonged to me since we were young. ))<>((.

Coprophilia is when you take an abnormal sexual interest or pleasure in feces. Coprophagia is when you eat them. Coprolites keep the record of prehistoric poop. Trace fossils, not body

fossils—not what was, but what they left behind. Copromancy, the practice of digging through someone’s shit, for either diagnosis or divination.

My cat used to walk around with these really sticky poops clinging to his butt. Climb on the couch, stick them in our faces. My mom would lift his tail and pluck them off with a wet napkin, scrub as much as she could before he twisted out of her arms. When he died, my parents mourned for an appropriate amount of time before getting new carpet.

Coprolalia: the involuntary and repetitive use of language that’s dirty, indecent, obscene. Originates from the Greek kopros, which means ‘dung,’ and lalia, ‘speech, chatter.’

Stool test results showed a trace amount of the bacteria that causes cholera. They put me on a highly potent probiotic that’s supposed to devour the bad bugs in my gut. A diet: no simple carbs or sugars, even natural ones, no rice, corn, potatoes, fruit. We’re starving them out, my mom said. No alcohol, which was hard, but probably for the best. I’d recently gotten in the habit of getting drunk and cheating on my boyfriend.

Dr. Jacoby does infomercials in the third season of Twin Peaks. He offers viewers a shovel that’s shiny gold—two coats. Shovel your way out of the shit, he says. Shovel your way out of the shit and into the truth. $29.99.

When I moved to New York, something opened up between my mom and me. I’ve always been pretty literal about distance. I no longer told her every little hindrance, no longer called her every

time something good happened. She emailed me an article about a serial rapist active in my neighborhood. I told her I was being safe. I never came home alone and drunk in the dark, I wasn’t spending nights staring at my rounded stomach in the mirror, willing it to pop like a balloon, wondering if I could make it happen if I cut into myself on the left side, just above the hip bone, with the blue knife I used to chop onions. Doing fine, I told her. Being careful.

Sometimes I lie like this after sex. I’m fine, I’m good, that was good, I’m finished.

But I still call her when I have panic attacks. From a townhouse stoop in the Lower East Side. In the stairwell at the library. Face pressed to the cold tiles of the bathroom floor. My mother the body whisperer. Doesn’t matter how late it is, she talks me through it, asks me which parts of myself I might be able to unclench, tells me when to breathe, and how deeply. She doesn’t need an explanation, or ask for one. After, she just says she loves me, says everything’s better in the morning, she’ll check back in then. She always does.

The last big stomachache happened in March of 2020, in Bushwick. Fitting—nothing good ever happens in Bushwick. My boyfriend of two and a half years needed to get from France to Michigan in the next twenty-four hours before international travel shut down. He called in a panic while I was immobilized, lying on my left side on a bench outside a bar, trying to fart out a veggie burger. They’d canceled his flight. This was bad news for me. I was waiting for him to get home so I could break up with him. I consoled him efficiently so I could hang up, so I could focus on willing enough gas out of my intestines to make space for a vodka soda. It was some of the worst pain I’d felt in years. But I’ll be damned if I wasn’t going to party.

After we broke up I stopped eating for a while. The stomachaches largely stopped, too. Nothing can hurt you if you don’t internalize it. It was a relief to maintain that base level of emptiness. To shrink instead of swell.

III.

Last week a squirrel ran in front of me, plump with preparation for the cold. I had the most intense urge to grab its round butt and hold it in my palms and press gently into it with my thumbs.

I wrote a story about a character who follows through on almost every impulse. My friends gave me notes. They didn’t believe her when she said she doesn’t want to kill herself.

Dysmorphia, as a collection of phonemes, is actually quite pretty.

I woke up one morning wanting to be full of pecans. There was a boy in my bed and I wanted him to leave so I could be full of pecans. Instead, he asked me about my morning routine. I said I make my shitty little cup of Folgers and spend an hour writing and he said just an hour? I can’t tell him that’s an exaggeration, an hour’s a lot longer than I can go without thinking about pecans. He finally goes home and I fill myself with pecans, then I throw up all the pecans, then I write for twenty minutes, and none of it’s any good.

Before my cat died, he lost his appetite. My mom followed him around with saucers of homemade broth. She said my dad was eating hot dogs for dinner because she was too busy cooking for the cat. She texted me: I made 2 kinds, beef and fish.

My favorite poet wrote about a dream in which the speaker leaves a trace of shit on the sheets during sex. …the mess / I made, of which I was so afraid: What would it mean, / if I made a mess of love? The night we became friends, the poet and I were trying to get boys to buy us drinks then leave us alone. We ended up in a booth with too many of them—she, therapizing a swimmer named River; me, bitching about James Joyce to someone who’d only hoped for a kiss. We walked home together. After that, we were always walking home together. It is important to know: in the dream, when she is finished loving the man, he dies.

My hemorrhoids crack open when I travel. They’re further back, though, so I don’t think he’ll feel them. We haven’t seen each other like this in a year because he lives in London, where I’ve fled after a painful breakup. It’s easier, now, to make me orgasm. I explain the miracle of switching from Zoloft to Prozac. This lovely sweet boy. He doesn’t even know what SSRI stands for.

Sperm whales sometimes engulf themselves in clouds of poop when people get too close, spinning on their sides to spread their prehistorically large load through the water. Scientists think it’s probably a confusion tactic, a defense mechanism. The BBC calls it a ‘poo-nado.’ Vice calls it ‘an ungodly cloud of ass ham.’

My apartment was leaking and my toilet overflowed. Rain came in through the living room walls and shitwater spilled over the lip of the toilet, onto the floor, across the whole bathroom, over to that hole in the wall behind the radiator. My downstairs neighbor knocked on the door. She told me our bathrooms were stacked on top of each other, and water was coming in through her ceiling. I tried to stand between her eyeline and my open bathroom door. Must be the rain, I said. Mine’s doing the same thing. That was in those soggy weeks after someone I chose chose someone else. After it was over he asked, Do you love me? He said, I wish I’d known.

Maintenance patched the leak in the walls and eventually the toilet flushed. I still haven’t bought a plunger. If you let it soften in there long enough, it will come apart on its own.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote about people who have problems with shitting and blame it on love. I used to think they were stupid, but now I think they’re right. What else can fill you so completely. What else leaves you so suddenly empty.

My mother has perfect fingernails. Luminous. Firm. They only ever betrayed her once, right before her wedding, when one of them broke and she had to get a fake one to replace it. It would have made a nice metaphor, but my parents are still together, still good for each other after twenty-whatever years. My fingernails are soft and shreddable and ridged from various deficiencies. I chew them when I’m not doing anything else and the broken parts get stuck between my teeth. This is where I learn my mother’s wisdom is not infallible. She can’t tell me anything at all about love. Not when it feels like this.

When my heart broke, everything slid right out of me. I hadn’t been that regular in a decade. I tweeted about it, and he liked the tweet, and I said, Stop liking my tweets, I’m trying to get over you. He said, I’m sorry they are funny. I’m sorry you are funny. And you liked my post on Instagram!!! I’m sorry you are sexy, I said, and then we fucked again, and I had to double down on my probiotics.

He never trusted my toilet paper. He’d go home when his bowels spoke up, no matter how sweetly—desperately—I entreated him to stay.

I had to stop taking my laxative. If you’re not careful, you can get addicted to being hollow.

At a bar in Venice Beach I tell my friend I’ll never love again, placing the back of my hand dramatically across my brow. You’re full of shit, he says, and after some time passes, I agree.