This thing has been eating at me for years now.
How ironic.
It welcomes itself into my skin and feeds off bones and thoughts that aren't even my own anymore. But don't make it angry because it'll bury itself so deep in my stomach that it'll start to sound like my own voice screaming at me through my bloodshot eyes. I've tried again and again to **** it in its sleep, but it only gets stronger the harder I try, and after all my attempts to ****** this ******* monster, I realize I've been looking in the mirror the whole time.

Hello my name is Anorexia
I will make you an obsessive freak
You will hate yourself
I will make you hungry and weak

I will turn your meat to bones
You will lose excessive weight
You must be super skinny
Food you must hate

Skinny is perfect
So your diet is strict
You live struggling
Because you are an addict

Do not eat breakfast
The scale numbers matter
Do not eat lunch
Do not get fatter

I promise to make you beautiful
I am your best friend
I will make you so skinny
Even if your life might end

Dreaming of walking model thin
Unaware she's bones and skin

She lives in a damaged brain
Drowned from her vomiting pain

Her insecurity torn up her mind
Left her bulimic and mentally blind

Always hugging her toilet beside
Half dead from purging her soul inside

Crying because her ugly reflection
She won't give up until she's perfection

Some days
They're just dreary
The sun outside-the clouds in your soul
But you see the world all too clearly
Through the shades
In your bedroom windows
Hiding away
From the pain
The lonely
The salty rain

His tumor
Seems to pound in your own skull
Causing a headache
-mostly fear-
And resisting the pull
To fall apart
Right along with him

His fades scars
Always a bleak reminder
He's not nearly as perfect
As he's seen-not so put together
He hides the long faded drawings on his arms
You hide too
From him-from everything

The food
The very kind she hasn't eaten
Knaws away at your stomach
Not enough words can be written
For her to know
How beautiful
How grown
She really is

So you hide
Because you're tempted to fall apart
But you stay strong
Because you want to save their hearts
You put down the scissors
Pick up the food
The pen
The phone
But still
*You hide

Starvation feels like recovery
And food feels like relapse

mark  number 1, the crack at the very top of your throat
for the times you've had to scurry out of the house
because it would've been too much time and too much noise to put on your shoes

mark numbers 2 to 12, for the number of tragedies you lack to write like a *****, to trick the devil into thinking he's a deity.

mark number 13, the crack at the very base of your throat (although sometimes it feels like it's at the base of your spine) from the brute force of all the words you've had to swallow but never rose in the toilet bowl, amongst all the other things you've purged

and boy,

have you purged your heart out.

I do not remember what it’s like to eat a piece of food and not think twice about it. Can you tell me please? Take me back to when I was just born, to when bleeding hieroglyphs no longer sat on my thighs, to when my veins were already flushed of a need to ****. The lipstick on my mouth is made out of the blood I dissect from my body at night. Once I spilled a raindrop of cranberry juice onto a rosé journal and I cried. He pulled me in between houses. There he laid me down on the grass and I felt oh so very strange to be surrounded by my home, a place of love and kindness and security and welcoming food always ready on the table surrounded by smiling sisters. Yet no one came to save me that night. And so I still think about it today, long after he has moved away and I have still stayed sitting around that mendacious table of warm food I refuse to eat. My school shoes are the only shoes I own. I sleep with them on because I’m convinced that the idea of a happy young girl in long socks and short skirt and ******* that poke out just a little will enter the chloroplast of my cells and join the war against viruses that take me to that too familiar closet corner with the carpet stained with blood. Or is it cranberry juice? I cry.