Ixchel Ledesma

Ascaris

2019

I have anxiety in my mouth. It was all the more noticeable when, while I was young, I started eating my mother’s yarn. I would devour ten or twenty yards of red string that would fill my little belly. It would take two or three days to expel it. Sometimes it would hurt, but other times I felt the uncontrollable pleasure of my swollen abdomen. Away from the eyes of Esmeralda, my mother, I continued to eat thread with a guilty pleasure. I liked the feeling of sitting there, alone, away from myself and from everybody else. I savoured how the strings would pass through my teeth that were unable to chew anything.