"why do I wish to die, if I have so very many reasons to live?... "

Gleanings gathered in the sessions of therapy, in desperate moments of quests for help, in secret diaries of young girls diagnosed as anorexics and bulimics. Labels that attempt to define the living paradox of serious eating disorders.

At times one has the strange sensation of overcoming the certainties of various scales, of body mass indices, of various diets, of the usual diagnostic categories, and in immersing oneself in the world of body, of food, of emotions of one who has an eating disorder considered to be serious. The sensation is that which one feels when it has to do with desire, impulse, the necessity of carrying out a mission. A cosmic mission, that transcends the person, the families, the others, by dissolving in an eternal space without words, in an internal profundity without bottom, in a spell and in a stupor of feeling full-empty, of wanting to be full-empty, of feeling alive-dead, of wanting to be alive- dead. The spell, the stupor, the seduction of feeling "elsewhere", the suffering, the agony, the sense of death in feeling alone.

If religion can be defined as the coming together of things to which a person in the final analysis attributes the major value of their existence, here the mission to carry out is a religious mission, with a state of unreachable grace (zero weight?), with mortal sin (bingeing? interrupting the fast?), with attempts of atonement (intense motor and intellectual activity?), with purification (laxatives, diuretics?), with exorcism (vomiting?), with remorse (sadness and a sense of death?).

In the presence of a girl with her 36 kilos and 200 grams, in a hospital ward, angry with the doctor on call for betraying her (he introduced nutrients into her veins), the little colored pearls and shiny charts of the "colonizers of normality", of the ambassador of "true faith" of the "healer of souls", shatter in a sensation of impotence, of inevitability, of respect. Of seduction?

This continuum oscillates between full and empty, between life and death, between "external space" and "internal profundity", between all and nothing, this impossibility of accepting the imperfection, the partial, the half-full or the half-empty, this body that to be touched has to have consistency, but if it has consistency it can be touched, it drags like the voce of the Sirens of Homer.

And then the return of life: time can wear one out again. Space closes in, to the point of containing this image of the imperfect body, now almost bearable.

The girl in the hospital, with her 42 kilos and her two to three daily meals, with the satisfaction of her parents and the reassuring smile of the family doctor, throws her impossible dietetic tables out the window, but doesn't know how to move away from the treatment space, from those persons that, even knowing they're not able to help her, have remained with her, accepting without condition the incommensurability of her existential space. The girl wants to grow, grow inside.