Hunger

Hunger

I was in a state of starvation from age thirteen. My teen years were nothing more than a gradual form of suicide. I starved myself for the perfect body. I craved attention, I craved power, I craved love. I was sick, in the mind, and in the body. I lost my youth to this illness, to this cancer that eats you from the inside out. This disease, that eats away at your body and your sense and your hope. If you’re lucky it will spit you out or throw you back up, like the food it teaches you to despise. This is a hunger. A famine. It will infect anyone without the strongest sense of self, something so valuable you can’t even buy it.

This malady is a true murder of crows. It claws at you, it picks at you, it hangs above your head and relishes when you fall.

I was thirteen when I contracted it. It being a sickly relationship with food, and with myself. I’m still standing, but I will forever bare the scars. I live with a weight that I can never shed; the heavy shadow of regret.

Anorexic: someone suffering from anorexia; the severe lack of appetite and inability to eat. I lost my taste for life, too.

I wanted to be beautiful. I wanted to be skinny. I yearned for a boy to look at me in that way. Those three things would mean perfection and happiness, that’s what I had thought. I punished myself for not following the rules. Everything that entered my mouth was sign of my weakness. Nourishment became my enemy. I found solace in the pain of hunger, knowing that I was in control. I would spend hours in the front of the mirror, disgusted and hating what I saw. Like this, no one would ever love me. I would walk until my knees ached, and exercise until my muscles burned. Any comments, any pity or concern, propelled me, encouraged me. I had control over them, too. I wouldn’t let anyone see me eat. I wasn’t sleeping, but it felt like my brain couldn’t stay awake. I had no energy, and eventually I had to stop my exercise regime and my muscles wasted away.

I became the epitome of emaciation. I was just a ghost. Skin. Bones. A heart supposedly beating. I walked the corridors of my life, people always staring, gawking at what was left of me. Was this what I had wanted?

I starved myself. I starved myself until my stomach was a hollowed-out cave, and each rib stood out, translucent skin pulled tight across them. A young women with no breasts, just a flat chest like a young boy’s. Losing weight hadn’t shed my old self and revealed a butterfly. It hadn’t exposed the beauty within, like I had so vehemently believed. There were no curves to be seen. Just the awkward angles of jutting bones. Even my cheek bones poked out; my face was a skull.
My head seemed to wobble on my neck. I was disproportioned, in body and spirit. I lost sight of normality. I was drowning, but I didn’t have the strength to swim. I lost so much.

My body did what it could. It grew a fine layer of hair over every part of my body in an attempt to keep me warm. It was greyish-white and soft to touch. I was messed up, inside and out. No one would ever want me now.
So I spent my days looking at old photographs of a girl I once knew, at times I missed, and thoughts I longed for. Happiness. Fulfilment. I had felt either in a long, long time. I became addicted to magazines, and the people, the perfect people.

I decided I would get my life back on track .Finding the strictest diet I could, I halved the intake. Turns out it wasn’t so easy to go back the way I had come. I threw up often; partly my body’s fault, partly mine. My teeth began to rot. Now even my skeleton, the one thing that was solid in my life, was beginning to fall away.
There was no where I could go. No where to run.

That’s when I went to the hospital and became an inmate. I was diseased.
Tubes feed me daily; I was a baby bird learning to fly. My body was on the road to recovery. My mind, however, was never going to be ‘fixed’.
I good deal had been broken over those years of my life. Whole years; gone, eaten away like a feast on desperation.

Beauty.
It’ how you are inside.
It’s in the eye of the beholder.
Beauty is but a frame of mind.

In a world that worships perfection, the meaning of beauty is lost. There is no cure to this illness. Those young things will continue to despise themselves, and crawl the paths that I have, convinced it won’t happen to them. Beauty. Is it really worth it?

What does it actually offer us, except something forever out of reach?