I love you,
and I'm so happy for you
for telling everyone who you are,
or I wish I could feel happy for you and our friend,
but I am filled with longing to see you,
and I want to tell you that I dream of doing everything for you,
of loving you,
and just of being near you.

God, I make it hard for myself to breathe,
driving my confused fists into my ribs,
willing them to stick out and be so brittle I hear them break.
I want them to break by someone else's hands,
so I have a legitimate reason to be hurting,
and so I have a real reason to break into the night alone and weeping.
I can breath again, and I once again feel that love for you and know I want to run eight hundred miles to you.
I know that I would never run into your arms, but I would love to see you again.

I long to hold out my arms on the door to let your through
and see you walk under them, because you're short enough.
I wish I could see you smile and I'd see the color of your braces and your lips stretch thin.
I want to see your smile again.
I want to look at your long hair, and I want to know everything about you.
I want to make everyone know that you should be loved,
and that I might love you.

God, I can feel my bones trapping me here,
but I want to be there.
I don't want to be here, hiding bruises and cuts and bones,
and lying about love and lying about my life.
I would give my body and life to be near your,
maybe even if you hated me.

I want to protect you,
I want to love you,
but you have others to do it for me,
and I will probably never see, hear, smell or touch you again,
but I will be thinking about you for years,
remembering.

I haven’t weighed myself in weeks. I have this incessant itch inside of me longing to know what numbers I ring up to be. But everyday I hear another gnawing voice say,
“You are not a number, you are a person. A number does not define you. What defines you is your kindness, your efforts, the way you live your life.”

But what happens when the way I’ve been living my life for the past year and a half has been nothing BUT numbers and scales and nutrition labels and dysmorphia. What happens when my efforts have only been reduced to reducing myself? What happens when kindness overflows towards others, but I cannot even look in the mirror and say “I love you.” What happens when you are completely consumed by something that refuses to let you consume?
-Does the tunnel end soon?

The soles of my feet,
raw.
Mile after mile, i run
To clear my mind, but deep down it’s to see how far away I’m able to get from this version of myself

My spine,
bruised.
Sticking out like thorns in a garden, piercing the skin
Every sit up brings me closer to pain.

Fingers and toes,
cold and brittle.
The blood does not flow fast enough anymore to keep me warm.
Once iron filled, now ghostly pale.

But
don’t you dare try to write me off 
as if I am completely broken
when all I am is cracked.

I will learn how to fill the missing pieces,
the parts that slowly dissipated behind closed doors.

Trust me,
I am worth salvaging.

eat-ing dis-or-der
/ēdiNG diˈsôrdər/
noun
1. Waking up every single morning with the same thoughts you’ve had for the past 9 months. How flat will I look today? Are my ribs poking out any further? Does my spine look any more sickly than before?
2. Weighing yourself before you go to the bathroom. Then after you go to the bathroom. Proceeding on and on throughout the day, as followed.
3. Being so hungry, you’re simply not hungry anymore. More so, just exhausted. (Being exhausted is a good thing, because that’s when you can finally fall asleep. That way your mind doesn’t have to keep nagging you about the hunger pains you feel in your stomach.)
4. Wearing 2 sweatshirts & 2 pairs of socks under 3 blankets, yet still feeling the icy pain running through your veins. You try anything to stay warm. Coffee helps, but only for a few minutes. Steaming hot showers are nice for the time being, but stepping out into the cold air, feeling your already brittle hair turn into shards...it’s hell. (Ironic, right?)
5. Not being able to walk past a mirror without pulling up your shirt to check your stomach for the 20th time today. I’m not vain, trust me. Far, far from it. One of the last things I’m capable of feeling right now is love towards myself.
6. Longing for a way out. Laying on your bed in the darkness, staring at the ceiling, just wishing that there was a fucking off switch to all of this. Every goddamn morning to every goddamn night. You know what you’re doing is wrong, but at this point you don’t know who you’d be without it. That voice, I mean. That voice that never goes silent, even when you politely beg with tears brimming at the eyes. You try so hard to push it away, and to remember a time in your life when you were “normal”. When you could wake up and actually enjoy breakfast. It was your favorite meal of the day.

Now, you can’t even fathom a “favorite meal”. The empty plate, the clean spoon, the untouched napkin. Everything except the food- which is now harrowingly the perfect vision of your “favorite meal”.

Looking in the mirror is like a death wish
A glimor of hope before the horrid thoughts cime floading in
Screaming at the top of their lungs.
And the tears rush to the surface as I pinch my skin
Grabbing it tight
Pulling at it with all my might
Wishing
Wanting for it all to dissapear just like myself
As i slowly turn and turn that small glimor of hope gone
Flushed away by the rotton words that captivate my body
Screamimg for me to

                     "STOP EATING"

I walk away woth a heavy heart sinking down to the lowest part of me
Hiding away frim anyone
Ignoring every word spoken to me.

My mind
My body
My whole being has been captured by those fithly words and throughts which are tormenting me and eating me alive
Without a word
Or
A thought i move on frim the plate of fruit and the bowl of chocolates
Swinging with a heart heavy,
Yet filled with nothing

I act like it has no effect on me
Like it doesnt hurt at all

Just stop eating
Bury every second
You spend lingering in the kitchen
Looking for one more midnight snack
Replace that time with
More productive things
Like exercising off the bowl of
Baby carrots you had that day
That pushed you 34 calories over
Your 500 calorie limit
Watch your mom still
Call you fat
And your sister still tell you
To put down whatever you’re eating
Because you’ve had enough already
Greet your bones
Get to know them as they
Come out of their shell
Protruding at odd angles
From the husk of your torso and legs
And when you have to pull the hair
Out of your hairbrush everyday
And you can no longer feel warm
And your periods no longer come
Look in the mirror and tell yourself
That it was worth it to
Just stop eating.

I want to feel.
I want to cry again at night
so I can't lose sight
of what matters.

I want to feel.
I want to be happy even when I'm not empty
so that I can be so happy I'm as nice as can be.

I want to feel.
I want to be so angry that I can cut myself
without needing to make up a reason
for just wanting to see myself become a bloody mess.

I want to feel.
I want to feel so much terror
at seeing myself again
that I keep fighting until Monday,
and the next,
and the next,
until I can't keep living.