Your head hurts. Your hair hurts. Hair shouldn’t hurt. Hair should just be beautiful. Yours was (still kind of is, let’s be honest). The man you live with handed you a credit card, said “go do your worst,” and you didn’t even hesitate. Foreplay. You went to a strip mall, bought some jeans, got your hair done. You didn’t buy any lacy underwear. I know you didn’t because when the Chow Fun bloated you up like a Macy’s parade float, you discreetly unbuttoned the top button on your $85 jeans and a few playful wisps of pubic hair where in evidence. Not that the man saw them. He was going to town on his own plate of sweet and sour barf n vomit, oh god, here it comes again, now heave, I’ll bet child birth isn’t even this bad.

Jesus fucking Christ. How is this even humanly possible. Close your eyes and try to be distracted by the red pulses flashing, close your eyes tight, because hurling this hard may just pop them right out of their sockets, and here’s a revolting thought: would you still be able to see, your eyes swimming at the end of stringy strands of gore, your eyes wading in a toilet full of half-digested Chinese fucking A just kill me now? Let me ask you this question: what’s worse: the pain, the sound of your guts splashing, the gray and brown miasma when you open your eyes again, flecks of red and green, easily identifiable slices of onion (oh god oh god oh god) or the smell?

The smell, easily the smell, that biting stink of bile, stomach juices, whatever it is, the cloying gravy from the chow fun, the sticky sweetness of the overcooked onions. It’s a complicated smell, a three-dimensional smell, it makes perfect sense that the animal kingdom relies on smell more than any other sense, this is a smell you can explore, but you don’t want to, a smell with enough nooks and crannies and keys and crowbars to fill in your every pore and every crevice and overcome you. A replete. Try to concentrate on the ammonia, the bleach, the bathroom smells, pretty much the only comforting thing, ever.

People can call you obsessive, and maybe they would if they knew, but it’s not like you go around telling people how often you clean the bathroom. For fuck’s sake, it gets shit in once a day, so why the fuck not clean it once a day? Why does this hole need to be the dirtiest place in the house? Oh, they’d be glad if they were you, right now, throwing up and flushing and throwing up and flushing, they’d be glad to know their $85 dollar jeans where not knee-deep in e-coli, weren’t going to be ruined rubbing around on the piss-stained tile, cause there’s even a kind of relief, isn’t there, in that at least.

Asshole gives you a credit card like you don’t even have a job of your own and says do your worst like it’s going to make you horny and then when you bring home a pair of Vetter-DeVitas and hair that looks like something from the Academy Awards red carpet, all he can say is “you look great” and then take you to some shitty Chinese place and drink way too many Tsingtao’s and stuff you full of some kind of fucking bacteria, and then he passes out from one too many Tsingtao’s and doesn’t even bother waking up from the sound of your barfing so hard it’s like a hundred midgets used your stomach for a punching bag. Fucking midgets.

This is exhausting. It will never end. There’s a bead of sweat rolling down the crack of your ass. A truly nice ass. The result of hard work. An hour at the gym each day, Stairmaster, three different kinds of elliptical machines, treadmill, weights. You mix it up because you want to keep your ass guessing. You’re not saying your ass is your best asset, but you’ll be goddamned if it will be your worst. The man you live with seems to like it. Then again, all men seem to like a nice ass. No, check that, all men like access to a nice ass. Wait, no, all men like access to any kind of ass they can get. And what about tits? It’s just easier to ninja-grope an ass, is all.

What is your best asset? After this pukathon, your abs, no contest. Fuck fuck, here it comes again, how much fucking chow fun did you eat? Are you fucking kidding me, are you puking up food you ate from three years ago now?

Cause you deserve this, right? I mean, you’re an evil bitch, right, and you deserve this? Four or five or six boyfriends ago, cute kid, really too young for you, confessed one night that whenever he pukes it makes him cry, and you had to find out if it was true. See what it was like. So you decided to get him drunk, really worked him over. Shots of tequila, but he wouldn’t stop. He just kept shooting them, and it started to turn you on. You’re a weird little slut, always have been, and the way he was holding his liquor made you horny, so you pulled him into bed, but he didn’t want to. He was making half-assed attempts to push you away, but you got him on his back and got him up and got on top and he was too drunk to cum too fast which was fucking nice and then he got into it and flipped you over and was doing fine for about ten seconds until he puked all over you, clear nasty tequila puke, and you were freaking out, and he just laughed. No crying, just laughing. And few days later he calls to break up with you. That was a low point.

Your roommate in college, nice girl, cousin comes to visit, admits she bulimic, says it’s no big deal, says barfing is actually pretty easy, doesn’t hurt anymore, isn’t even messy. It’s like taking a shit, I mean, it’s not pretty, it’s not something I share with people. You go in, take a crap, wipe your ass, go back to the party. I go in, throw up, pop a breath mint, go back to class. And for months after that, the smell of breath mints made you queasy. Did you feel sorry for her? No. Did you feel some kind of weird envy even? No. You just thought she was pathetic and deserved whatever throat cancer she was going to get. Like I said, you’re an evil bitch.

Dry heaves. The worst. You’re empty, you’re cleaned out, and if you’re not as clean as the floor of the bathroom, the sink, even the walls, yes, you clean the fucking walls, you’re at least as clean as you’re going to get, on the inside. It’s like your gut’s not content with puking up everything you’ve eaten in the last two weeks or whatever, is trying to convince your intestines to hand over a few vital organs. Dry heaves, ripping you in two, a complex deep pain with pain tendrils opening every fiber in your core, ripping you in six, ripping you into a million little pieces.

Fuck, barfing up you liver or a kidney or a lung would almost be a relief. You can’t puke anything else, just stop, let it stop, please. Oh god. Rest your cheek against the toilet seat. Flush again. Drop of water splashes on your face, but nothing came out through that last volley, so it’s just clean toiler water, and maybe after a marathon cleaning jag in the bathroom the thought of even clean toilet water on your face would disgust you to the nth degree, make you want to curl up and die, right now you’re already curled up, and probably already dead. No way anyone can live through something like this.

Never again. Never again. You will never ever eat Chinese food again. You will never go that strip mall, that filthy little strip mall, and let them touch your gorgeous hair again. Who knows where this poison came from. You will never ever buy Vetter-DeVita from an upscale boutique. How upscale can a store in a strip mall be, anyway. You will never buy jeans again, or wear jeans again. If a man wants to see your tasty little ass, he’s going to have to do a hell of a lot more than hand you some filthy credit card and tell you to do your worst.

Yachts. He’s going to have to buy you yachts. No, fuck that. He’s going to have to sit at home and cook you dinner (gut tries to churn at the thought of food, but you’re too weak, necrosis must surely be setting in because I’m pretty sure you’ve infarcted your abdominals) while you go out and earn the millions to buy your own sweet yacht. Then he can see your ass. But no more jeans.

Think you can get up? You might want to drink some water. I know, I know, just the thought of putting anything in your throat is awful, but your breath is probably lethal right now, not to mention what all those acids must have done to your teeth. Puking is so not pretty.

Unlike your bathroom. There, take a sip, straight from the faucet, now’s not the time for propriety. It’s clean enough, like I said, lord knows. Breathe a little, air is cool inside your vomit-burned mouth. The problem, you see, is that whether it was the strip mall, the hair salon, the fun fucking chow fun, nobody cleans anything as good as you do. The world is a filthy disgusting place.

And let’s face it. Last time you puked like this, it hurt way worse. Next time should be a little better.