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Treacherous stormclouds brewed over the greyness of August each afternoon - at this point, it was almost a surprise when there wasn’t a seething discord of thunder to announce that the student body was off to its seventh period. Even odder, it would be, not to be tumbling against the rush of drenched students hoping to escape their teachers’ drawl of a lecture, whose clumped locks stood in wet peaks atop their scalps as if they were frightened alley cats, to the winding S-curve of automobiles lined up honking at each other in humorous irritation.
August was incredibly constant, in this way. Laying my head sideways against my forearms like a cushion, I would glance from the broken analog clock to the corner desk, to out the blinds here and there, then I would find comfort, in that God was still crying into the Earth with a fierce sense of disappointment. I understood Him all too well.
August also was incredibly constant in that I was successfully out of my unscholarly ditch of depression. I can’t stand laziness - and neither could He, apparently, or we’d see the sun once in a while. But for the first time in a long time, I feel that my limbs have turned to lead and my mind is rather lazy. Months had been looking upwards, it seemed. Towards that boundlessly beautiful, dull sky. Until today, and I felt no familiarity in the rain. I simply obliged with its insistence on misery.
But now I was thin. I was pretty. That was something to be considered in gratuity. Maybe I felt like lead. Or a worthless pile of bones. But I was pretty. I didn’t remember the last time I had indulged past what I deemed necessary to maintain my figure; this was something that I noticed was indicative of a blooming maturity. Or at least that’s what I attributed it to.
I also, in this newfound maturity, realised that everyone around me (under the impossible circumstances that they were underweight) most definitely had an eating disorder. It really fuels my own, only, I’ve been able to have that glorious reintroduction that provokes others to talk about how full they are after the third bite. Though sometimes the instance just makes me want to physically hurt someone.
While everyone was indulging in the fruits of dopamine-saturated stress relievers, I determined that food was bland, and uninteresting; somehow it had worked in my favour without leaving me noticeably emaciated. I do believe I’ve lost my period, however, unless I’m the next Virgin Mary. But that wasn’t necessarily a rare occurrence in the sphere of ballet. I guess I wouldn’t bleed on stage.
Shrugging my woolly leg warmers up my thigh, I winced when a patch of skin stung, revealing pinkish flesh. My skin wasn’t getting better. It would be eight months now since the dawn of the raw fright - it certainly gave me one - and though I knew why they appeared, I didn’t want to admit it out loud.
So instead, with seconds to spare before I’d be late to ballet, I fit my arm into my left hand, then my other into the right. It was only a habit. Admittedly not a very good one, but it reminded me that, despite my childish history of hoarding food to my room to eat my bodyweight in mounds of secret, low calorie shame, I was not that person any longer. I was disciplined, and it was revealing itself through the lines of definition on my legs, the shape of my jaw, and the brain fog that allowed me to call Chicago a state two hours earlier in my literature class.
This was festering into something akin to obsession - if not insanity - but for now, that truth had been mitigated by the flood of compliments I was getting, and on practically a daily basis. Who wouldn’t want to be told that they look horribly, sickly miserable?
Nobody wouldn’t. Double negative. Anyways, they didn’t call me such things. They called me more horrible things like beautiful and whispered under their breaths as I walked by and and expressed vehemently their utter jealousy for my willpower.
I love the way the mind lies to itself.
You know, I didn’t even want to be thin in the first place.
Actually, that’s half true; I wanted to be thinner but for different reasons. First, it was for me, so that I could love myself, but then it grew into an incredible and rather fascinating journey to becoming someone who could be loved by another. I paid little attention to the swooning, lovestruck idiots who did everything to deserve reciprocation of their feelings and instead, fell for the one, hard-headed prodigy who would never reciprocate my own.
And as he slammed the door on my heart over, and over, and even over, I lost myself.
My brain granted my body near zero will to accept something so far out of my control. Nor did it leave me with a particularly pleasant aftertaste; despite being aware of my own incapability to mitigate the heartache, I knew deep down inside that there once in fact existed a time where I could have prevented the whole thing. I could have stopped trying, but I didn’t.
“Whereas proud people call themselves proud, humble people never call themselves humble.”
Was I so confident to have ignored each rejection? Could I not have kept my mouth shut?
Clearly not.
So now I watch his eyes mirror my desperation, only to someone else.
All the great mountains of my pride crumbled to ruins. I had reached the mouth of the end of the world; a gaping, stretching void of anguish telling me that I had come this far, a wearied, tested traveller, only to escape to another hellish daydream resembling the horrors of its ancestor. What are the odds?
My stomach churned every day, and its peak performance was in the middle of our few conversations. Maybe it was a good thing if my intestines were in knots, though. That way I wouldn’t eat my heart out as aggressively as when he stomped all over it.
I notice sometimes he looks at me. But it’s a pitiful, concerned look, the way a mother looks at her child when she knows she’s cutting herself. The way a doctor looks at the parents of a sick relative, fumbling for words to describe her time sensitive, life-threatening condition. The way he tries to hide his shock on the first day of school, without seeing me for months, and my bones are jutting out in all the most uncomfortable ways. And I heed myself to the purposeful promise I made last November, that I would show the world how starvation was just as much a drug as love.
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