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.