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.

A letter to dad.

Dear dad, I cannot tell you how long I thought about you. Probably my entire adult life I have spent talking myself into and out of writing to you. A part of me feels that I love you more than I love anyone else. And a part of me hates you, for leaving me, and for not even caring that you did. And what I hate most is, that whatever you do now, all those years that I lost, I will never get them back. I cannot express enough how much I wish you had stayed. We could have helped each other, dad. I know you don't know this but I'm you. All those questions that circle your mind endlessly, the ones that made you leave, they somehow found a way into my head too. And I can't help but feel that when you walked out on me, I lost the only person who could have ever helped me understand myself. I don't mean to sound selfish, you took that privilege away from me with you, all I mean is that you and I are the same, and you don't even know it, because you don't know me. You never stayed to raise the child that needed you most, and what you never learnt, is that I would have raised you too. I struggled for years, arguing with myself, convincing myself, refuting everything I had concluded and starting from the beginning, and when I finally reached a resolution, I felt calm. Nine years of slowly destroying myself came to an end. You are not a good person, I told myself, and you will never bring me anything other than doubt and anxiety. The way you have controlled my life over the past nine years without ever even being there is unbelievable. For the first time I got a voice. I stopped letting other people tell me what I should do. I wanted to listen, how can you not when people tell you he's your father, write to him, but I knew that they didn't know him, and they didn't realize that I transform my life into my everything. And now that you're gone, for good, for real, now that I've accepted what I've done, it's all coming back to me. The calm shore meets the storm again. He's a good man, she says, and I feel like I've been fooled. Because a good man wouldn't destroy the woman he loves, because a good father wouldn't leave his six year old child, because a good person wouldn't obliterate all the good in his life. For years I heard stories about you, nightmares, and I tried to make excuses for you, because that's what a good child does, she protects, and I needed you to still be my father, and not just a monster. And when I ran out of reasons to hold on, and finally walked away, I hear this, that you're a good man, and that you have a kind heart, despite all of your actions. They played me, and it's nothing but a cruel joke. I love you and I hate you, and that's as simple and as complicated as it gets. Hate is easy, it only had one layer, but love is endless, and that's the worst of it. If you love someone, however little, life is no longer black and white.

For you

Every time someone raises a glass I drink for you.

(I love you)

Love

I walk around the empty hallways and you're everywhere. The room is filled with you, your face stares at me from the picture frames, your scent whispers from every corner of every space. The silence is overbearing as it stares me in the face and there is no way to defy it. I pick up an album from your shelf and take a picture, Peter Pan, your beautiful face, your staggering soul which has complete control over my every action. I hold it and take it with me, I'll find you some place safe, I'll carry you right near my heart, as I carry your voice, your eyes, your everything, every day inside it. I feel you Peter, your every move speaks to me, every silence has its perfect meaning and I never lose it. To the edge of everything, that is the promise I made, that is the distance I'll go for nobody but you. You are my exception, the only one I'll ever make. I read you, I read you like the most life changing novel, filled with beautiful phrases that revolutionize my world. You are love to me, you define the feeling and give the word its meaning. I love you just, no reason, no purpose, absolutely no agenda. My feelings are just there, the most honest cry I have ever uttered. I don't pray for you to love me back, I don't ask or beg, or even expect. I just love, and love is the most real feeling I have ever experienced. I heard a myth. It said that if the emotional pain is real enough, it translates into physical pain, and all the symptoms are right on the outside. Now I know it's not a myth. My whole body aches and I become a walking cliche. I don't ask for anything Peter, I ask for nothing in return for what I feel. What I want most is for you to be okay. I need you to be safe, and happy, and loved, and in love, and inspired, and never alone. I want to protect you, but there is a whole ocean between us, restless waves separating what I want to do from what I can, so I pray that you have a guardian angel to protect you for me. You made me selfless, and I miss you every single day, and it never gets easier. To tell you the truth I'm terrified, because I know that life isn't perfect, and that the world can be cold, and that too many hearts are never healed, and that heartbreak sometimes becomes a lifestyle. Yes Peter, I'll wait forever if I have to, but I am so scared, because despite living with my heart, I see the truth, and sometimes the only ending someone gets is an inevitable crash.

I feel you like I have never felt anyone else, and I know that the way I feel for you, that is exactly the way to love.

Perfect

I washed away something essential, and by turning my body into a self destructive machine, I won. I reached out and grabbed perfection by the arm. She told me it takes more than that, she said that the price to pay for its possession is high, almost unthinkable, and that only the strongest, only the weakest, are willing; but that the surrender grants salvation. I paid that price; I went half way and watched my life transform itself. Now I am more beautiful, and with great beauty leaves great responsibility, but there is yet miles to go and the stakes keep getting higher. Perfection demands more, she grips at me and gives me a taste of an alternative future, but the future is never granted to us on a silver plate. We have to play and play dirty to taste its juice. She calls to me in a serpent like manner, merciless, ghostly, never satisfied. She pulls at me, and the voices take over. I find myself torn, I know the strength is there, I know the limitless weakness that breaks the wall is right inside of me, and all it takes is one single 'no' to make the deal. I understand the implications completely, and my sick body reminds me of the hardships to endure, the betrayal I am committing by being loyal to the wrong queen. But what scares us most is what we call to, tragedy enchants me and I reach out to grab it. The promise of tomorrow is interlinked with tragedy, one will not come without the other, and as I feel the pain near my heart, in my stomach, in my head, I surrender. Perfection, you are now my queen, and I serve to you as your most loyal soldier.

Dear Peter Pan,

Dear B,

I realize that everything I write, I write in letter form. I need to feel like somebody is listening, because otherwise these words turn into wind. Dear B, I'm sorry I'm doing this to you but I feel like it's all I can give you... All I can give you is this void, an empty space that may kill you, but just as likely may help you live.
We're not all beautiful, sure as hell not on the outside. That's a fishism, a meaningless sentence created in a conspiracy. Dear B, one day I'll stop and I hope you'll say thank you. Dear B, I'm sorry I became you. 

There was a time in March...

My world turns upside down unexpectedly. His face appears on the screen and that is it, there I go, completely blown away. I love you, but those words don't even do you justice.

TOO PERFECT.

Dear 17 year old me,

I want you to know that what you're going through, what feels like the worst thing that has ever happened to you, will become the best thing that you have ever survived.

Tебе до нее не дотянуть.

I consume caffeine and nicotine, hoping that's enough to keep me alive.

Everything is fine.

So what's new with you?

Well let me see mother. I've become so obsessed with beauty that I haven't eaten in days, and the two times I did eat, I went to the bathroom and put two fingers down my throat. I'm not proud of it, but I can no longer live this life. I can no longer be around you and feel the disappointment, the silent judgement of how perfectly imperfect I am. I know you compare us, and I know that in your eyes she is beautiful, because she never let the food she ate destroy her. And then you look at me, the slightly bigger figure next to her, and you wonder where you went wrong. You don't realize this but that look kills me. I guess all children carry in their DNA the desire to gain the approval of their parents. I never thought of myself as this person, as someone who would become so affected by the outside world that I'd turn my insides inside out. I never thought I'd get here, but right now the end justifies the means. What else is new? I've been smoking a lot lately, it's my way of controlling myself. In fact, there is hardly a time when you wont find me with a cigarette in my hand. I know it's bad for me but right now it feels like the only thing that isn't bad at all. Don't worry, I'll wash all my clothes before I come home so you'll never know. And something else? I am dreading friday. I know that you both are excited but all I feel is mortification. The Caribbean is for beautiful people, and I have never been less beautiful in my life.

I'm sorry mother, for not being able to say these words out loud. Instead I say: Everything is fine.

Free

'Then I would ask you how you would describe yourself in only one word... but I already found it. Because I also have to give ONE word for the type of person I admire, and I really do admire you. You seem to me a very strong and self-confident young woman, one who knows what she wants and fights for what she wants. You travel a lot, you’re not afraid of taking chances. And then he said : « free », and I think that word describes you perfectly.'

The sadness

The inexplicable sadness is back, after weeks, maybe even months, of letting me live. I foolishly believed that maybe this time the wind took it away, far, far far away, maybe over to some other open window, where it invaded another girls life, eating her from the inside, leaving nothing but the desire of destruction under her fingertips. Maybe it did blow that way, but she was too smart, she found a way to trick it back outside, and it flew around like an orphan only to find a window and a dim light it recognized, and it came back, haunting me with its dreadful silence.

The tale of an alcoholic.

'I'm an alcoholic', he says, and I listen intently as I look into the mirror of my past. 'Do you get along with your father?' 'No' my lips whisper, but only inside my head. I could never say it out loud, to him, to myself, to anyone in the world. Because once words are out, the wind carries them across to places, and then they no longer belong to you, they belong to the world, and it has authority over them as a father might have authority over a child. He talks, and he notices my silence, and the anger rises in me as my thoughts lead to only one resolution. Put your beer glass down, I command, silently of course, put it down and go home to your children. How dare you? How dare you pity yourself as you drown into the forgetful state of your master, the drink inside your hands? Your children need you, your family needs you, and I would have needed you if it so happened that you were him, the father who forgot me as he raised his drink to his lips. Go home.

Most people say that what they want most in life is to be happy. I just want to be inspired; whether that's happy, or sad.

Deja fucking vù

And this all feels a little too familiar, being assessed not by who I am, but by who I was. I guess I never realized that a slope in my past, a slope when I was a child, could bring me down today. How do you deal with rejection? I guess you just move past it, feeling a little less worthy than you did before. I am just so fucking tired for apologizing for being myself. I feel like I'm saying 'I'm sorry for being real'.

It's not crazy, it's pathetic.

So stop.

Fiction

I'm fictional. The emotions that I experience, they're all a part of my make-believe. I create stories and I feel through them. Things that never happen, things that cannot happen, I make them feel so real, and then I hurt, I hurt over things that I create, because to me, feeling is beautiful, sadness is the greatest form of art. And feeling is so essential to me that I need a story, I need something tragic to make me real, and through the irony, my fictional feelings sink under my skin. My life is so empty that without the make-believe I will die. The real world gives me nothing, it's grey, completely colorless, and I can't accept it. So I create scenarios of drama, of love, of heartbreak and of death so I can find some meaning. I hurt over made up betrayals, I laugh over the love stories I myself create. How is it possible that I haven't gone extinct yet, when every layer of me is fake? There is nothing real under there, I am an empty nutshell, I have nothing to offer and nothing to take in.

And my feelings for you, they are based on lies too. Lies that I choose, the ones I myself carefully craft. I create the immaculate heartbreak, and then I ache. I obliterate myself through the lies I live.

There is nothing real about me. Every great sentence, every virtue I acquire, I possess only in my own stories. I just experienced a breakthrough; I am fiction. I don't exist.

Self fucking analysis.

Writing has always been my answer, so now, with no agenda in mind, I will write. Except as always, of course I’m lying, there’s always an agenda for me when I start writing. I’m thinking about back then, 5 years old, me, him, us, the reckless days when there was no future ahead of us, just a drunken today to have fun with. L, to me she represents what was back then, the careless days, when everything was about fun. We got drunk, we ran away, we laughed, boy did we laugh, the whole world could have been defined by laughing then. And him, that boy who turned into my first (messed up, of course) relationship, my first crush, my first kiss, almost my first everything. He said he loved my eyes, and I loved his smile, when he looked at me. I loved him kissing me on the forehead, on the face, the way he looked at me, as if he didn’t see the disaster that I actually was. All he saw was a beautiful little girl. He told me he loved me, as we sat on the pavement drunk, and I smiled, and then I asked him if that’s really what he just said. And of course, the shy boy, M, you were so shy, said no. but then something happened, its like suddenly you got your courage, as you held me, and you said that yes, you did just say it. And I kissed you and said I love you too. My first I love you to a boy. My only I love you to a boy. Can anything measure up to that? The first love, the first words, the first feelings, and consequently, the first heartbreak. I never cared about the rumor, I just wanted an easy out, because I was scared. Even back then fear was with me. I was scared and so I left, you suggested it and I promptly agreed. It was such a competition back then, who will break who’s heart. I remember holding your hand, has anything ever felt as great? No… nothing ever has. And then you were leaving and I sat there at night wishing for you and feeling so much pain, to a 14 year old the world is such a crushing oyster. I wrote text messages to you that I never sent, I imagined, I dreamed of you kneeling before me and saying sorry. And you did! Isn’t that crazy? The one time I wished for something and it actually happened. You said you’re sorry, and I hugged you, because that was all I ever wanted. For you to call me back. And then someone else came up, and started talking, and all I could think about was you. I held your hand and you held mine back, and then we kissed on the couch and it was like we were never separated in the first place. The last good night. The night you said you loved me. And I said I loved you back. The one time I actually meant it.

But then you left, and the laughter felt irrelevant. I’d wake up every morning, me, the girl who never heard her alarm clock before, woke up, and sat all day smiling at the screen as you wrote and wrote. I don’t know what I was hoping for then, but that’s the thing about 14 years olds, they’re never realistic, and that’s their greatest charm. They believe the world to be invincible, they believe that love does as promised conquer all. I lived for him. I wonder if he lived for me? I wonder where that love letter is, the only love letter I ever wrote. He offered to give it back to me but I said no,and he said he’d keep it in his wallet. I wonder if he ever re read it. I wonder if now it’s burned.

Is it normal, this pain, this suffocating refusal to give it all up? It’s been 5 years M, and it feels like I haven’t moved an inch. Maybe I needed a finale, but im no longer 14. Love does not conquer all anymore, and tomorrow doesn’t turn into one big party where we can all forget. Maybe that’s the thing, I miss the simplicity of it all. Back when I didn’t have to worry, back when my mother worried for me. Now its all about those horrible things of which I don’t want to even speak of. I want to go back, I wish for my dreams to take me there, but then I know that the wake up call will be oh so painful. The butterflies will destroy me. I am the girl who gets destroyed by butterflies who are 5 years too late in leaving. By now they’ve turned into huge red dragons, eating away at me, as I still cannot find a path to leave.

Do you love her? Please say no.

Can it be that it was all so simple then? Or has time re-written every line?

And just like that, like clockwork, you come in to haunt my night.

Living in dreams of yesterday, we find ourselves still dreaming of impossible future conquests.

Charles Lindbergh

I write to age... to understand... to accept... maybe even to deny.

But most of all I write to live.

A chance against the wind

The blonde boy walks down the street away from me and I wonder what he’s thinking. A little fragile figure trotting down the street, helpless against the world, against his future. I wonder whether I judged him too fast, whether I looked at him like at a black and white picture, when really he was a canvas full of rainbow-flowers. Because our souls ache, all of them, even those that seem simple. Your simple soul makes me wonder, what are you hiding? He hides behind the TV, behind the games, behind the silence, and I wonder why. Maybe inside you’re fighting some battle, a battle known to no one but you, and the world judges you by your silent lips and your lifeless eyes, and your weak posture. I try to picture you as a child, back when the world still had no effect on you, back when the world was a game to you, back when you crafted it yourself and lived beneath your safe creation. But those built stones shatter, we grow and learn that we don’t have a chance against the wind, the world will take you and thrust you under its own wheel, and if you learn to steer too late, you might risk losing it all. Am I risking it all?

To M,

They aren’t magic string, but they are strong. They hold me, they enwrap me and they never go loose. I listen to the drunken lyrics in the background: I want to fall in love. I breathe through them as my lips carelessly drop out words, words which a sober me cannot utter: I need to fall out of love. I need to fall out of love with my past; it holds me ever so tightly that any possibility of the future becomes undoable. This place is so you, M. And this boy is so you. He holds her, my best friend from years ago, and I look over at her, just as she must have looked over at us, wishing for something as good. She has it now, I am the lost one, I am the one wishing for something as good. Why do relationships have to be this hard? What an easy question; because the only thing harder is being alone. To me you are the present ‘cause we never had an end. I miss you, I believe in you, and what’s worse, I believe in us. I believe that if you were here then we wouldn’t just be good, we would be great, we would be fireworks and love and magic, we’d fall in love all over again and our past would be our fortress. I am the girl who lives for the past, the future is bleak. I live for my fourteen year old self, for five years ago. Today doesn’t exist because today isn’t something I want for to exist. I want five years ago back. M, how can the world not hold magic string for people? How is it that for me you’re still here, for me there is still an us, there is still that chance, that unlikely, that crazy, yet beautiful possibility, the chance out of a trillion that things might still work out? Am I broken, why is the past still here for me? Why is it that I’m wishing, praying, pleading, that it’s still here for you too? Except no one else does this, no one else punishes themselves like this, forcing the past down their own throats for another chance, never, ever, letting go.

We never had a big finale, we never had any sort of end. We are like a guitar string ripped in half in the middle of the song. M, tonight I would have given anything for you to walk through the door and make the last five years obliterate into space. You’d kiss me on the forehead and everything would have been said, I would have known that this time was necessary to keep us alive, that back then we were far too stubborn to survive, but that now, now there is not a thing that could tear us apart. Because this is the way things were always meant to be for us, this would be our ending and our beginning. These would be our fireworks, your lips pressed against my forehead. Is there anything you would have given? Is there anything at all?