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)