I remember being friends with a girl who spoke like a fawn and was as thin as a stick. Her face naturally beautiful, her eyes gleaming with happiness. A pageant queen. A cheerleader. But when she told me about protein shakes as fillers for meals I learnt that the happiness was fake. No matter how much she got, who she saw and met, no matter how many "Miss Teen Canada" titled she won, she would be unhappy. She has constant girlfriends come and go, each her own lovely and unique thinspiration; a collage of limbs and bones she aspired to be. Her obsessions took a hold of her for six years, making her sad, delusional, crazy, until the point she hit the 89 pound mark. Until she ended back up in a hospital. I told her I cared. I meant it, too, but I knew the voices in her head were all too loud to hear my truth of her. The truth of a brilliant, talented girl. Sometimes being called "beautiful" is not always a compliment"

I know a boy of european descent. Born in Bulgaria, raised in Canada for just a couple of years. His English got really good after sixth grade, and that's when we finally became friends. I guess now you can say we're best friends. To my expected surprise he turned out to be gay. And to my surprise, it seemed like there was something deeper. He recently sold himself, something that can now only be a shell or a casket. His parents didn't know he was 29. Or that he was gay. i thought about all the fun times- all the sassiness, the dumb jokes, the radio job- and it made me think how much of that was for show. A fake smile. A talented, lively comedian. One that hid behind crude jokes that portrayed a reality all too real to him. Someone who has silently suffered for far too long. I wish he didn't. I wish he didn't have to hide. I am always scared that his last word he hears will be a derogatory one.

There was a girl I was very jealous of. She was my best friend, and creativity flowed through her like a waterfall starting at her heart. She was everything I wanted to be- intelligent, beautiful(in the natural stunning way) and thin. She was so thin. She had impeccable music taste, and we bonded over that. Despite the ******* rock we use to hit the **** to, she enjoyed classical music. She liked being alone. And although she was a self proclaimed optimist, she would hide away her guilt and sadness. I knew she was like me. We both took cold showers while we layed on the bath floor, hoping our hearts would freeze. We would walk the streets of downtown Toronto, praying that the night would swallow us whole. We would *** smokes off of older men in hot leather that rode Harley Davidson's that secretly wanted to **** us. And our cigarette smoke would stick to our summer-kissed skin, and id be even more jealous of how she became tanner and I began to look like a pale little ghost. She was lovely but cheated on. A young looking boy with a galaxy of freckles on this universal boy-band face. He ended up being wrong. The galaxy turned dark black, the boy-band tunes into soft, somber cries. Her cries. I remember having to sit back and watch while I rolled a spliff; I thought about it when I was being caressed too. Optimism can make you see brighter days, but it doesn't stop the hurting your heart will face.

There was a boy I knew who use to smoke his lungs away with **** and french kissed death with pills drowning in alcohol. There was a boy I knew who always use to skip class, but came every once in a while to let the teacher know he was alive. The boy grew too fast, or maybe too slow, or both. One part to reliable and the other too aware. He knew all the causes but never the solutions. He would always fight with anger because he never knew love. No one ever loved him. Instead, i picture him going home, parents neglecting him as he, the lost boy, goes up to his room. Closes the door, drops the blinds, cries. "Be a man" the voices say, but he can't tonight. He focusses too ******* the pain (it's finally something he can focus on). And there was this boy, who dug his nails into his palms, drank until he couldn't see; swinging punches and hitting air as his opponent was strung out on the other side of the room. I never knew if lost boy would cut himself to drain out his sadness or if he snorted more lines to forget what was lying in front of him. I wondered show long it would take lost boy to put the gun to his head and call it quits, how long till his name flashed on the news. Lost boy eventually drowned himself in the bottle, finished the pills, ran out of money and now we don't ever hear from him. He's just lost.

-teenage experience

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