Skeletal

40.5.

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The number screams at me, glaring at me from a round face that could have been a clock, if my vision didn’t work properly.

My heart shrivels up as cold summer continues to go on as though nothing has happened, as though the world isn’t crumbling away underneath a person who’s surprised her legs haven’t broken beneath such a heavy, pointless weight. The trees keep swaying their light branches in a soft wind, the sun keeps filtering through to the ground, everyone, thin as sticks, smiling because they have everything.

I smile, too, refusing and deflecting offers and questions. Under cover of darkness, I cradle flabby skin as growls erupt in a primal sin. There is a dragon inside me, breathing fire all over an empty stomach.

I can survive on air and bad memories. And then, I will be beautiful.
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39.

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The hunger is easing but the smell is overwhelming. Scent is a seductive thing: baking on a cool day, deliciousness wafting from an oven, makes my mouth dry up in longing and desire and envy.

Days run past, grabbing my hand and pulling me along, sending me down a spiral of despair. Pages build up, words upon words of a lonely story of an obsession that’s stuck inside me, eating me from the inside out. My only friend left is writing.

One day, I will be thinner than paper, and that way, no one will be able to see me.

A defiant face stares out of the mirror, crying of nights spent with only three hours sleep – hunger is too painful, you see – and too many days spent inside, hiding under jumpers while others laugh at how apparently sensitive I am to the cold.

My lips pull back in a distant smile.

Pain is absolutely nothing – soon I will be invisible and nobody will be able to touch me and nobody will be able to look at me with diseased eyes of dirty thoughts I don’t want to see.
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38.

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I can count my ribs in the mirror with my eyes. Sometimes in the morning, I wake up and my stomach isn’t flat but curving inwards, dipping down near my bellybutton.

I can hear them whispering still, their voices high with cruel amusement. They ask about the number today. Oh, still on the same? They cackle with delight and I trip on their gorgeous skeletal feet.

Every day, I glance in the mirror and scream.

The cold creeps into my veins and rests there, unwelcome but clinging to the marrow in my bones. It hides in the flaps of broken skin, bleeding as warning signs on my hips. There is someone inside, sighing, shaking and almost scared.
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37.

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Black spots dot my vision when I stand up too fast, swaying on thick feet. Blink, blink, blink and it’s all gone and shoved into the safe at the back of my brain, locked and sealed and bolted a hundred times over.

Food is just an obligation now: Once a day, nothing more than 150 calories. I grin, crooked and cracked, swallowing the cardboard in a silence that is worth a thousand words.

There is a haunted hollowness inside, eating away at my beating heart.

And yet I slip up and swallow too much somehow and I’m writhing and sobbing and scratching at the skin. The bath’s floor is cold on my hands as, panicky-eyed and wild, a plastic handle is shoved down and my throat feels swollen and it hurts it hurts it hurts –

An hour later, I emerge, painted smile ready, blood rinsed away and hands clean.

My gut is stabbed again and again every night, though, as I write down my list and stand on the horror machine, the number giver, the scales. It seems as though the hand never changes, glued firmly to one spot, unmoving.

It’s just one step to getting bigger, one step to inflating, one trip and I could be falling forever. I cross my fingers and clench my fists every day, wishing, longing, needing…
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36.

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The high is like nothing you can even imagine – floating on a cloud of happiness, glee and satisfaction, staying away from the awful fattening stuff suddenly so much easier for just one blissful day.

But it always starts again.

I’m walking on a world where I can’t remember the taste of chocolate or ice cream or even meat and I tell my tales with grumbles of a stomach I can feel moving through the skin and a pen and journal that fills a little more each day.

Looking in the mirror, I can see my skeleton and it is beautiful. Sometimes, I can see something scary: An emaciated girl whose clothes hide her from any kind of help. But more often, I see something even scarier: A girl who needs to lose just a few more inches, a few more kilos, a girl whose thighs are the fattest she’s ever seen even though they can’t touch until the knee, whose cheeks are too round, her stomach too flabby.

Most of the time, I feel like picking up the glass and stamping on it until the splinters pierce my skin.

Bruises are appearing with a worrying frequency, on my legs usually, marring them even more with ugly grey-purple marks. Everything is heavy and faded. My limbs are so hard to move sometimes.

The only thing that’s wrong with me is the too-high number.

I stare at the skinny white scar on my wrist and wonder if trying again would also stop everyone from looking at me.
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35.

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The world is a black and white place now; all the colours have been leeched out, run away and died somewhere in a dark corner. Sometimes, I just fade out completely, until I realise someone’s talking to me and my senses start working again.

I am a broken bird but soon I will be light enough for my broken wings to lift me, and I will soar away, far away to a place where no one will be able to hurt me anymore.

My head is vague, full to the brim with nothing but a never-ending buzzing and a single goal in my mostly air-filled head. I need to be thin, to be insubstantial, to be without any kind of shape or matter.

The whispers are still calling now, still screeching in my head like they’re never going to stop…

‘Oh, she’ll be pretty soon, just needs to work a little harder.’

‘Fat pig, shouldn’t even look at food, it just seeps into her blood and leaks fat fat fat everywhere.’

My bloodless lips form incoherent sentences about the lumps on my stomach that I think are my muscles and the ladders of ribs up my chest, crevasses between them, one long, protruding line up my back, bumps and ridges easily felt.

I never smile anymore. It hurts my cheeks.

I’m as pale as a ghost with bruises under my eyes from disturbed sleep and lips that are ragged with teeth marks. It always has to get worse before it gets better, I murmur to myself.
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there’s something wrong with me but I’m not thin enough to ask for help.
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34.5.

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It hurts
like nails stabbing into my skin
and my stomach is a shrivelled up hollow now,
my skeleton now my body,
dizzy
empty
blank –

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I break on a bright afternoon and two hours results in almost 1,000 calories swallowed and chewed and savoured. The taste was vibrant on my tongue, like a rainbow dancing there. The black and white became coloured in with beautiful taste.

I spent the night with a stabbing stomach ache and guilt that spread through me like poison.
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I don’t care.

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I’ve grown back into and out of the smallest size shops sell here. My ribs have sheltered back under my skin. My cheeks are not hollows. My eyes are not dead.

It crawls up in my mind sometimes and sits there, like a dead rat, stinky and rotten and disgusting. And it whispers still, in my ears which now aren’t muted anymore.

‘You’re going to be fat as a disgusting pig, you stupid, gross thing.’

And I smile –

At least I’m not a barely-living skeleton.