I'm sitting in the library before school,
talking and laughing like any other day
when you reach over and pick up
a book on overcoming anorexia.

You hold the nonthreatening orange-and-purple cover in your hands
that I once thought were gentle
and scoff, saying, "People with anorexia are so stupid."

Our friends sitting around us agree
and laugh and joke about it
while I sit in mute horror and suppressed panic
and dig my fingernails into my skin
until someone asks
why I'm not laughing.

Why am I not laughing?

I am not laughing at the disease
that consumed my life for nearly a year,
that ripped and clawed its way into my mind
and through my veins
like an addiction,
like a freight train gone off the tracks,
out of control and spinning
and uprooting everything crucial and meaningful
and burying it it flames,
turning it to ashes.

I am not laughing
at the nights I spent crying
and hating myself
while I felt the lining of my stomach
try to consume itself
in a poor replacement of the
sustenance I was denying myself
while I again dug my fingernails into my skin,
pins holding a dead butterfly
to its morbid display.

I am not laughing
at the thoughts that constantly filled my head
of death and disaster and pain
of wishing them upon myself
of making them happen
of letting myself shrink
and shed the space
that I believed I did not deserve to occupy.

I am not laughing at the thoughts
that after two years still plague me-
is my stomach sticking out?
do you really deserve breakfast?
your thighs are too big
your hips too wide
I count fewer ribs each day
you are fat
fatfatfatfatfatfat
worthless fat useless fat pathetic fat
you deserve to die
fat.

I am not laughing
at my choice
of slow suicide
that I made the
agonizing choice
to save myself from.

I am not laughing
at the book that I myself read
at every torturous bite of food I took
at every painful step of recovery.

I am not laughing
because I will not take away
every moment I felt strong for not relapsing,
every prayer I pled
every tear I shed,
every time I decided that I did not want to die
anymore.

I am not laughing.
I am leaving.