Relapse.

It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

Sylvia Plath

Please get this.

It's not your fault.

Pick me.

My dear Peter Pan,

Today I had a thought, the worst kind, the kind that kills. I imagined getting a phone call, and the world ending. I realised that you're all that keeps me breathing. You're far, a whole world away, but that doesn't matter. Just knowing that you're there, across the ocean, safe and breathing, always breathing, it makes me feel safe. Because as long as you're walking this earth, I am not really alone, I can live. I believe there is a force in the world and that force is love. I am linked to you forever, and you're the only forever that doesn't make me want to hide. You don't scare me. All the letters I write, all the words and sentences that I push out of my body, they're all for you. You're the force that keeps me going. And as long as you're okay, the earth will keep spinning, and the seasons will keep changing, and the sun will come up each morning, and the stars will shine each night, and I, I will walk these streets alone, but I won't be. I found you, and I will never be alone again. Even if you don't pick me. But please do.

I picked you.

I miss starvation.

Don't.

I don't really pray but I will for you. I don't know if you were there and if you pulled the trigger, but I do know that it doesn't really matter. I take a drink for those who died, and another one for those who killed them. I don't respond to death, I believe in life, for better or worse, whether deserved, or no longer given.

The weakness that makes us love.

In my dream you had a skeleton figure. Fragile, so destructible, completely unprotected. I watched you as you lay in the empty room and I needed to protect you, an instinct stronger than anything else. The isolated crib in the centre of the room, where you could be watched by them, where they could pity you because they didn't love you. I tried pulling you away from them, as the word 'anorexia' slipped from their lips, and in that moment, I loved you more than ever. You weren't the boy I fell in love with while awake, your personality, your strength, they were different; but inside, I could still feel you, I knew that under the shell it was you, exactly the way I knew you. So love didn't change.

(An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.)

Possessions (Byatt)

You got inside my head. You got me terrified.

The way I love you, that is art.

I want.

Everything you want to happen will happen, if you decide you want it enough.

Fight.

I'm going to write something that I won't be proud of. (I'll try, but not really.) My stomach is filled with things it does not deserve, the lack of hunger makes me feel guilty, and I want to turn back time. I starved myself for days before, I promised myself that it was worth it, I gave myself nicotine in exchange for the strength and kept going for just one more day. The days I gave in I punished myself by making myself throw it all up. Bulimia has become a very personal subject to me. But I am not bulimic. I'm just like an amateur who tries something new and gets hooked for a while. I sat by the toilet and told myself I didn't deserve better, I told myself words of hate, and then I promised myself a cigarette once my body would be empty again. The cigarette became the light at the end of a dark tunnel. (I can never give up smoking.) Thing's are different today, a good different, but to me, everything is dark. Because I kept my promise, it really was worth it in the end. The end may not justify the means but for me it certainly did. It made me more beautiful, not on the inside (my insides are torn), but on the outside. There's something odd about all of this, I wonder if that's the real reason people hold on. It makes me feel special, like I have some sort of secret in my pocket and no one else can own it, it's mine, and it gives me a purpose, it makes me feel important.

Today I'm sat by this computer and my stomach is filled with cookie, cookies I never deserved. (Cookies I will never deserve.) I go back in time and wonder why I had them. It wasn't hunger or a craving, or anything in particular. I may not be bulimic, but I definitely have a disturbed take on food. I'm going to promise you something now, and I'll try not be proud of it. (A promise is only a hope.) I'm going to be beautiful one day, and by one day I mean one day very soon. I'm going to close my mouth and start viewing food as my enemy, because it is. My body is big and it can't be much longer. I'm going to make a promise now, as of right now, as for forever. On the most ordinary evening, with nothing to make it remarkable, I am going to declare war. I am fighting this as of this very second, and I promise you, it will be so worth it. So I stretch my hand towards the drawer, and pick up the half empty pack of cookies, and I send them flying to the bin. Goodbye everything that isn't a step towards perfection. I make an oath to make this my biggest fight yet.