I was sixteen years old when I effectively vomited for the first time. As my mother’s pasta and the words of a boy I thought loved me flooded my esophagus I grasped the cold sides of the toilet seat with sweaty palms and bitten down fingernails. I looked into the mirror as if my reflection had finally transformed into a wax figure I had been burning at for years and I knew it would never go back to its original form. I’d seen that look before, in girls wiping their lips in high school bathrooms, girls who wore baggy clothes and flinched when boys playfully poked at their stomachs, girls who put rocks in their pockets before being weighed at doctors’ appointments and covered up bruises over fragile bones with whatever makeup they could find in their mother’s drawer. I sit in health class as the teacher speaks of the dangers of eating disorders from a third person point of view and it seems as if the only sound anyone is hearing is the growling coming from my empty stomach. I stand up from a lunch table in the cafeteria and freeze at the words of a girl telling me I’ve gotten as skinny as my three month prematurely born best friend. I walk through the front door and immediately remove every piece of clothing that might weigh even an ounce and I step onto the scale with hopes of seeing my importance rise as the numbers fall but no one ever told me that I am worth so much more than 96 pounds.

I am nineteen years old and I am no longer drowned in a sea of panic when my father asks me what I've had to eat today. When my boyfriend glides his hands under my shirt and over the top of my waistline my head is not consumed by the thought that my stomach is not flat enough for his liking. I do not sit in class and think about the flesh of my thighs bulging from the holes in my jeans that a boy once told me looked like tumors under my skin.
Okay, there are days when the only one who knows I am my own worst enemy is the mirror and okay, I still politely insist that the lights be turned off before I let him touch me with satin fingertips and okay, I still have a way of instantaneously counting calories in my head the same way I counted on myself to stop years ago but
I only weighed myself once today.

I starved to look pretty
I purged to feel better
I cut to feel less
I smoked to feel more

Now I have no energy

And now

I just feel nothing.

Happiness: The ultimate goal, right?
We all want to be happy
We all want to feel fulfilled.

We see pictures of smiling, skinny bodies
and we know what happiness looks like.
It looks like thin faces
frail arms
tiny legs
concave stomachs

The first step to being happy is
looking
the part.

She filed her dreams in alphabetical order,
Wiping the dust from her minimalist future.
She boxed them up and piled them high,
Shrinking them to match her thighs
And the looking glass began to lie each night
Telling her the weight of her dreams
Was too heavy to fight.

You ask me, what anorexia is like.

It's like slipping or twisting your ancle without anyone seeing, no one to help you up.
You sit until someone comes by, they help you up, but after a while you slip again.
This time your sitting in mud and slowly sinking into it.
And when you're two feet into that hole, a person comes by and tries to help you since your anvle is hurt.
But you're afraid they'll fall too so you ask them to leave.
You start to crawl out and finally get up, but slip again.
You fall down in that hole again, and this time you beoke your entire leg.
It starts raining and the hole grows deeper.
It's 5 feet deep now.
One of your well known friends comes by and tries to help you, but ends up throwing you a shovel.
But actually you start to like your hole, you take contact to people, who also fell into a hole.
There are sites on the internet, some shows how to get the deepesr mist perfect hole.
Other shows how to get up.
But you're sad, and you like your hole, so you try to get that deepesr one.
You want to win this, you wanna show everyone who called you weak that you can get the deepest hole in the world.
But when you're 20 feet under ground, and everyone starts to notice your hole.
Everyone is willing to help you.
And suddenly you have 20 shovels, and 20 stairs.
But you can't decide wich one is better.
*That's what being anorexic is like

the pain.

she envied the movie star like glistening smile.

she wanted to be like the girls who were carefree.

she wanted to be beautiful.

but beautiful to her was thin.

it started when someone called her fat.

"am I?" she wondered.

so she starved herself, maybe eating a ******* or two after mama told her.

but she spit them back up because she couldn't help it.

she wanted to be like the pretty school cheerleaders.

and she hated herself.

each time she stepped on the scale she cried.

the numbers soon went from 88 to 89

"im doing it wrong" she thought.

and she continued on going day by day with water.

swallowing and spitting back up.

eating more and more.

and spitting it back up.

she was slowly going insane, day by day.

she started slicing her wrists like meat.

she started crying herself to sleep.

she became empty of adrenaline.

she didn't want to wake up anymore.

i guess you could say that

pain, is an understatement.

If you could see past my eyes
Into my disquieted brain
You'd think I was obsessed
Or at least a little insane
You would shake your finger at my thoughts
As I chase ribcages while caging myself
Into a world of bones and rot
I can calculate calories into a formula for happiness
Like I measure my merit with a measuring tape
And I know that "looks aren't everything"
But it looks to me like they are
Because society suggests that you "be yourself"
While screaming the importance of beauty and wealth
And we all know that ugly doesn't make it
Into the movies
Just like fat doesn't make it into the magazines
If I could look into the mirror without seeing
Distortions
Then maybe I could convince myself to eat bigger
Portions
But as the story goes, as the song is sung
Another girl loses to the battle of one
I'm at war with myself, and it's making me sick
Sick in the head; sick in the heart
I sicken myself as I'm falling apart
I hate this hollow pursuit for a hollow life
And yet I secretly starve myself
In an attempt to get it right
You might be somewhat confused
As to why I undergo this kind of beating
Yes, hunger is painful
But so is eating

If you give a girl a with a big heart your broken pieces,
she will gently pick them up and carry them in her soft hands,
and pay no mind to your sharp edges.
She will try to glue you back together
and she’ll do it in a way that made you forget you were ever broken.
With scratched finger tips and ****** palms,
she’ll lift you up to the sun,
letting it's blinding rays shine through you
to show you that even the worst things have things to love in them
and that even the shattered can again be whole.

If you give a girl with a big heart your body,
she will study you like an archaic God.
She will learn your curves and surfaces like braille,
she will adjust her hearing to the pitch of your laughter
so that no matter how far apart you become,
her ears will perk up like a dog's when you giggle,
and she will smile, knowing that you smile.

If you give a girl with a big heart your time,
she will make each second feel like infinity,
and each sunset like the end of the world.
You'll forget that the universe is as vast and wondrous as it is,
because you will be so captivated by the light that she emits
right where she sits,
by your side.

And if you take from a girl with a big heart,
please,
for the love of God,
do not take it all.

If you take from a girl with a big heart,
please remember that her love is not a renewable resource.
The wind and the sun and the water will forever be there to serve you but
she will run dry, and become another fact of history that will one day be forgotten.

If you take from a girl with a big heart,
please remember how sharp your edges were before her,
how lifeless your body was before she touched it,
and how meaningless time was before she made it into something magical.