Content warning: eating disorders, self-harm
In the hospital gift shop there were Tic Tacs. Not one flavor or two flavors but all of the flavors available. Cinnamon tasted like cinnamon. It would be strange if it tasted like anything else. Cinnamon's not that hard. The color is a deep red, mimicking the appearance of ground cinnamon.
The gift shop was a poor excuse for an outing. The baseball game we were supposed to go to had been rained out. The Cardinals were going to play the Padres. The Cards would've almost certainly lost, though. I'm also not a big fan of baseball. They didn't really let us pick where we went, so the gift shop was the only option.
Tangerine tasted like an industrial chemical pretending to be a tangerine. Absolutely foul. A pale orange that makes you think of orange but is instead an insult to all life. Zero out of ten.
The teacher on the adolescent crisis unit brought us down here. She was a sweet lady. She liked the same kind of music I did: mostly jazz and classical. She photocopied pages out of The Anatomy Coloring Book because I was fascinated by the human body and loved learning intricate details of every organ and every system by coloring them in one section at a time. She'd stop by Kinko's each morning and copy me off five or six more pages, knowing I'd have the ones from yesterday done already.
Orange was like tangerine in that it tasted nothing like the real thing, but it was not actively offensive, just strange. The flavor goes from too subtle to too intense too quickly. It would benefit from a slower ramp-up. You won't believe what color it is.
The day before, the cafeteria had sent up the wrong dinner for me and I was very upset. The nurses were short-staffed so they made me sit in a chair just outside the nurses' station. I was facing the Dutch doors that led into it. The top door was open. I didn't want to eat what they gave me so I kicked the door and yelled at them for a while. They said I should be embarrassed for acting that way. I was, but not as much as I was angry. Not so much about the food, just everything.
It's hard to argue with wintergreen, though if you don't like fresh, minty flavors, you are out of luck. Even if you've never tasted anything called "wintergreen," you can likely imagine it. They're lime green, which is strange since the wintergreen plant is darker. Perhaps they thought if it was too dark it would make customers not think of mint. Mint candies are usually bright colors, or even white. There is probably a good reason for that, but I don't know what it is.
The girl on the unit was a little older than me and suffering from anorexia. They gave her protein shakes to bulk her up. She couldn't leave until she gained a certain amount of weight. It seemed like such an arbitrary and dehumanizing process. I wasn't sure what was supposed to stop her from just losing weight again once she left.
There's spearmint because you can never go wrong with another mint flavor. They look and taste aqua blue. The spearmint plant is not that color. They really take a lot of liberties with these color choices. But spearmint is not bad if you just want a no-nonsense breath mint.
The boy on the unit was closer to a man. He was 16. He had burned a smiley face into his arm at one time, which left a scar, though that wasn't why he was here. The scar was old. It looked cool, but the process of obtaining it most likely wasn't. He had a Sega Game Gear and played Columns on it. For a Tetris knockoff, it wasn't too bad. He was kind to me. He might have felt protective because I was several years younger than him and it was my first time. He was a frequent flyer.
Green apple was probably closest to a legitimate fruit flavor out of all of them. Darker green than wintergreen, it had a nice hint of sour and the rest tasted more or less like apple. Its proximity to a faithful flavor illustrated, however, that Tic Tacs were perhaps better as novel riffs on real flavors rather than close approximations, at least when it came to fruit. Mint is mint. It's kind of hard to fuck that up.
There was a pond outside the hospital and Canada geese were always hanging around it. They were angry, seemingly at everything and everyone. I could relate. But I was more afraid of them than they were of me. They didn't seem to fear anything at all. I wondered what that felt like. But then I remembered that a lot of birds aren't very bright and get themselves killed in situations a human would know better than to tempt, so maybe there wasn't much to envy in those gray and white terrors.
The teacher bought me all of the Tic Tac flavors in the gift shop. I asked her to. I didn't have a particular reason I wanted them. I just wanted to feel in control of something, I guess. She seemed befuddled by the request, frankly, but she didn't protest or give any indication she resented doing it. She must have felt bad for me. I might have felt bad for me, too, if I wasn't so busy hating myself at the time.
I couldn't eat all the Tic Tacs while I was at the hospital. I took the rest with me, which was most of them. It took me months to eat them all. Even the ones that tasted bad reminded me of her kindness. It was such a small thing. But sometimes the small things mean everything.