6AM THOUGHTS ON BECOMING A MUKBANG YOUTUBER

There's a woman trapped on the face of the monitor who knows my secret. I can see it in her eyes. Her pupils expand infinitely outwards and she looks to the corner of the screen when she does it, just to tell me that she can move like me, that her moans sound like my own. I do not think that it is real. I can not imagine her enjoying the feel of it.

Let me start at the beginning. Take an apple for instance. An apple is a word used to describe the thing itself. It is green or red. Maybe it's growing on a tree. Maybe not. But, look closer at the apple-thing's contours begin to break down, the flesh itself bleeds in with its surroundings, there's a bite in it here, or a worm in it there. It receives its nutrients from a tree and, as such, is a part of a wider system, a becoming-tree.

Why was I using an apple as a metaphor?

Oh right, the void on my monitor. So, in the first scenes, before her body is introduced, a title screen appears with jingles of a cowbell. Ding. That ding is the indication of what is to come. A becoming-stuffing. A signal of what I'm about to see, Pavlovian in that sense. The cowbell works in the same way as the word apple, it is a kind of map that defines the act that is to come, a topographic delineation of what I am watching.

In the intro scene, her room is a cube of alabaster. Drums pulsate from the draught under her door, sharp, steady, submerged under the droning sound of whale cries. Usedcvnt, I think. Her chair has been turned to face away from me so that I can only see her legs. They're neotenous wires, a doll’s legs all made of porcelain, ready to crack. Her posture splits a banner in half: an anime girl with pink hair, her clothes torn off to reveal skin with an impossibly white gleaming. It shimmers against me. Like waves with a paper cut. Her chair swivels and her body is positioned to be perfectly symmetrical. Organised. Clean. Prepped with a small spit of oil between her breasts. Pink bikini. Her skin is always flawless in the introductory scenes. And then she'll look off past the screen, as if there's someone else recording her, as if she gets her enjoyment from someone beyond the frame or behind me. Brief fear that I'm in a pantomime, he's behind you, whoever he is. Then she'll moan. It's like an actor pretending to be sober to play the role of a drunk, circuitous, a simultaneously hidden and revealed implication that she knows me.

She knows that I can't do it.

Not even with the excessive cleanliness of her room. Not even with the cowbell signifying it, awakening what should be the desire within myself. It's just not there regardless of the ritual, though, of course, the ritualism of the scene does make it possible to watch. She is faking it so that I can watch her fake it. I'm aware of the irony there.

But I just don't believe that it's real.

I go back to my monitor. I am trapped within her room. Red streamers cut across the background. She is doing her makeup slowly, so slowly, like she enjoys her lips turning to bright roses. In the corner of her room, a door is locked. Or maybe it is not. I can't tell when the doorknob is circular. I look back and she's still doing her makeup, up to her eyes as she looks into a ring light away from me. Again, I wonder what is behind me, what she is looking at. And deep down, I know. It's what I clicked on the video for. But I don't want to confront it. And I don't want to see the part where she is hollowed out by a crowd of plastic tentacles. I tell myself that I'm doing this to revise how people work, how they have caverns inside of them that need to be filled. How they call it natural. And how they call me sick for missing out on it. If I can watch it happen, even a pantomimed version, perhaps I can figure out how to make it real inside myself.

I turn myself off and the monitor still blares. Rewind it and her smile frames my thoughts. I'm thinking of Titian's Venus with a Mirror. An ornate, red velvet covers Venus' waist, drawing me up, bigger, up to her gaze. But, when I look up to the goddess I see her looking away from me and towards a mirror. I try to get more of her. To sketch her out in my head. To meet her eyes. But in the reflection of the mirror, the grotesque eyes of cherubim stare back, laughing at me. Somehow, I am wrong. I'm trapped in an irony that I can't understand. And my attempt to look at Venus, to read her expression and figure out what is wrong with me becomes a moment of humiliation, of laughter and those weird little kids. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the guy who masochism is named after, did write a book on Venus. 

Maybe this is masochistic somehow.

I turn the monitor on and click on another video. A man behind the camera asks what she does for a living? Laughter. What does she mean by that? Edit of what might be erogenous zones: armpits, eyeshadow, legs at 10 and 2, Bathory shirt with a pink filter, perfect geometry to her. Socks have been washed recently. Perfect organisation to her room. Bedsheets are properly made with a vague, hazy shadow of some indistinct object. I tab over before the scene turns. Don't want to see what the object is. I am the Bose-Einstein condensate, a particle when I am hot and a wave when I am cold. And only a cold wave can merge with what was about to happen.

Venus' eyes are always refracted away, just to erase me, just to prove me worthless. To suspend me in her own room like one of those modern art pieces. I'm Hirst’s Mother and Child, Divided. I'm the calf suspended in formaldehyde, bisected into two even pieces and sandwiched between the mother. My decomposition has been halted by a blue ocean around me. My organs have been whitened. Cleansed. Chided by God. 

My skin is stuck in an ocean of stagnant fluid, suspending me in a bile that returns endlessly back to a web of matriarchal arms. Scared. But that's not the point. Point is that sometimes people like to pass between me. Through the empty space that runs through my head to my tails. These people like to marvel at the cleanliness of my organs, they hold their own children by their waists and wonder which side, if either, looks better. My intestines are PVC tubes that have ceased to function. That's why I'm revising.

I play the video and watch tentacles grow out from the corner of the frame. Venus seems happy, like it's normal and I'm the strange, perverted person for watching it happen. I'm sick for finding it sickening. She reaches her hand out towards me and I hear a clattering sound, then squelching. She draws back a fork and a plate. I tab over again.

Three minutes and seven seconds. That's the longest I've ever watched a mukbang video. Today was only twenty. I've failed, disappointed myself. Cow. Stupid cow. The red streamers that bordered her room drop down and onto my forehead. A headache starts between my eyes and quickly forgets about being a headache. I look up to her ceiling and feel a knitting needle fall between my eyes, into my pineal gland and down the sagittal plane of my body. I'm split into two. There's no point moving my right hand and risk separating it from my left, no point confirming the divided asymmetry of what should be one body. Cow. Cow. I don't say it but regardless, my uvula moves up against the roof of my mouth as if in anticipation. As if waiting for the word to come out of my mouth. I'm trying to hold it back, turning green as I swallow. I tab over and on another window, she's there biting into an apple.

The contours of green skin break down. The original, circular shape of the fruit becomes increasingly formless. The topographic map that marks the object, its designation as an apple, becomes more and more vague. I attempt some sort of region of best fit, pretending that I could still call it an apple. But any borders I might dream up are wrong, imposed on an increasing spongiform thing that bleeds into her molars, that sticks between her teeth and are crushed inside a small black hole. The woman and the apple are one, indistinguishable thing. She has broken it down enough to incorporate the main, fleshy part within herself and smiles at this like it is enjoyable for her. She places the core back behind the camera, behind me and her web of ring lights. I guess that it's going to a bin somewhere. The apple is now it's waste product: the core, and the smile on her face, and the sound of her masticating gums, and the sterile white of her room, and the blazing brightness of the monitor, and me as I watch. I feel green again.

Ding.

The bell rings again and forces me to keep watching. Cow. Cow. Cow. The clanging sound pulls my face back into the monitor and towards the woman. I'm in her room. My eyes are transfixed on her smile, trying to figure it out, trying to see what's so funny. Is she laughing at me? Is she laughing because she knows my secret? Presumably, there is some kind of irony that's amusing to her. She glances at me. A flash of deepest blue, of sapphire that bounces around like a kaleidoscope of colour and then, just as quickly, disappears; her eyes are left out of reach, any expression that might tell me what is wrong with me falls out into the ether. 

I look down to her throat. It undulates with a slow rhythm, moving like a snake cascading in on itself. If I stare for long enough, I might be able to make out the green skin trapped in the rings of her throat, consumed and then broken down and then incorporated within her body. The juices will form a new lining to her oesophagus. Nutrients, microbes, and pathogens will cross between the porous borders of her skin; she'll be one with the network of trees and apples, caught in the cycle of life bleeding into life.

Reminded of my mother. She used to tell me not to eat apple seeds unless I wanted a stump to grow out of my stomach and through my throat. I did what she said. I mean, obviously I didn't want to suffocate on all the bark. She taught me how to keep myself healthy, how to lock doors and shut out contaminants. And the apple was an insidious, viral disease. So how could the woman in front of me enjoy it? I click on another video. I'm going to figure it out.

Ding. My organs are dissected into two even masses, bleached white from shame and suspended in an art gallery. I'm the calf from Hirsts' Mother and Child, Divided again. In front of me, Venus starts another long monologue about what she's going to get filled up with today. Suction cups writhe about in the periphery of the frame. Scaly, iridescent whips lash across the screen, turning into an indistinct blur that reminds me of strobe lights or an old camera with a slow shutter speed. The woman's voice slows. It's cut up by the tentacles. She looks down at the plate of pulsating flesh and offers me a smile. It's perfectly symmetrical. And she has the cleanest teeth I've ever seen.

Ding. Venus sits me down in another room made of white. Square tiles are pasted onto the background, shimmering like a circuit board that leads my vision along the vertices, like I'm obeying a programming that the kitchen architecture has forced me to. I scan through grind lines of cement and then towards her face, her mouth bleeding into an amorphous object, that object bleeding in with her, the grease proliferating upon her face like translucent currents of snail slime. I tab over her room. I'm learning nothing from this, except that clearly I've missed the point. Clearly I don't feel the way that I ought to when it comes to consumption. The only way to learn would be to watch her more, to make myself like her and see how deep this rabbit hole went.

Venus uploads two videos a day. She pretends to enjoy the process once around noon and then later on in the evening, dead at five o'clock. She maps the space around her into a vortex of sterile white (she could probably record in a hospital room) and covers a table or dresser with a black cloth. A sacrifice for the audience's enjoyment. It must be pretend. Beneath her room, a wall of comments compliment her figure, her skinny waist or her smooth skin; they suggest the next objects that should bleed their way inside of her yet, simultaneously, criticise her for it. She's going to lose her waist. She's going to look old and gross. I keep scrolling until I hit a block of text, a paragraph fashioned from that one, constant word repeated over and over like a stutter: cow. Fat cow. Dirty cow. The word rings in my ears. A thousand mouths making the occlusive, cutting 'c' sound; it's like they're knives attacking her, attacking me, attacking whatever it is that is wrong with the both of us, a web of my mum’s needles that slide their way down our throats.

I wonder how she can stay so strong. How she has the strength to carry on uploading. And although I want to, there's no time to cry. Not when it's those comments that might tell me what's wrong with me. What could've been tears is swallowed back down my throat and once again I find myself submerged in a sea of the world's vitriol–Hirst's calf stuck in formaldehyde.

I scroll back up to Venus. She's paused, frozen at a moment where she's separated from the tentacles and gaping beak of an octopus. She is kept in stasis by my spacebar. I feel like it's some sort of gift to her, a way of shielding her from all the comments, all the suction cups bleeding into her and becoming one agglomerated mass. It's a gift to me too. I could unpause it and watch her eat. And maybe it would force me to figure out what is wrong with me, what sickness has sunk into my bones. But I can't do it. I can't even believe that the desire to eat it is real. The only real thing about Venus and I are the words people use to describe us. Cow.

Is Venus trapped because of her audience, forced to perform some unpayable debt? They gave birth to her. They gave her a house, a life, a freedom to be a content creator. And, just as quickly, their jaws clamped down and they repeated that word: cow, cow, cow. She broke the contract somehow and the comments had turned to shrieks, to webs of hate that enveloped her like a fly caught between a spider. She was sick, she was ill for breaking her part of the contract–contradictory as it was. She should be a mukbang Youtuber and a frail young woman, a Madonna and a whore. I realise that I'm thinking about my mother again.

Her face has disappeared from my memory. It is a black outline with a mouth attached to it. A black hole inside a black hole. A lattice of white molars that lined up to call me that word: cow.

Venus and I were the same creature, drowning in an ocean of the people around us, split apart to reveal organs that had forgotten how to function. I'm trying to make myself cry now, but it just comes out like the 'c' word. Cow. A plosive cut, a languorous oh and a final moaning expression. I move backwards and onto my bed, moving my pillow to the other end so Venus' submerged face can watch over me as I sleep. Something like a guardian angel protecting me from my own flesh and blood, from a mouth that I was born from.

Even with her absence, I am scared to put anything inside of me.

I can't sleep. The popcorn patterns of the ceiling are starting to break apart, a ceiling ripped off by a thumb in the night sky. I miss you every day. I can't walk into a kitchen without you being there. Remember when we used to go to the park? I don't want to be loved if it's a hate like yours. I miss the way you made coffee. You've bleached my organs white. I beg for forgiveness and why, when it's your fault? She's a blank face stuck behind my eyelids, contoured with a strict order of rhinestones. I sit up and sigh. I move my Rei Ayanami figurines sitting on my bedside table, facing them so that they're positioned away from me. I turn the monitor off. Complete black and I still feel it even with no one watching. 

by Liam Chimba

Liam Chimba (He/Him) is a graduate of Creative Writing and Philosophy from the University of Chichester. He lives on the East coast of England.