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"God, you’re so thin. It’s perfect. You don’t even look like a woman. You look like a little girl.”
The disturbing nature of things is always occurring to me when it’s too late.
“Leave it to a man to wait till after he fucks a girl to ask her real name.”
I know this. Rationally, I know this. And yet I also know it would feel like a betrayal. It would, in a sense, legitimize the girl I used to be. The girl I killed.
Once he’s gone, I return to the mirror. It is my altar. My cheekbones, my xylophone ribs, my flat stomach, my thigh gap—these are my sacraments. For so many years I hated the mirror. It showed me ugly, unbearable things. Now it is mostly a comfort. And when it’s not, when it demands more from me, appeasing it is a simple matter. The sacrifices it requires are so trivial in comparison to its rewards.
I like the rumbling; I like to imagine it’s the sound of my organs eating each other, reducing the mass of my body.
She’s thin and beautiful, but not as thin and beautiful as I am, so I don’t hate her.
“I get it. The whole chasing darkness thing. The need to see how far down you can go. Do what you have to do. Just don’t go so deep you can’t make it back to the surface.”
Seeing other people eating always arouses juxtaposed sensations of disgust and superiority within me. These feelings play off each other. Feed each other. My hunger becomes a halo. It gives me wings which carry me above the mortals so dependent on their sickening sustenance.
“I knew Helen before she was hot,” Zelda says to Ianthe. “She was fat when I met her.” A tiny, crumbling death happens inside me. I can feel my ribcage constricting around my heart.
I’m defying my body’s needs in order to be something more than human. Something better.
I could, but that’s not enough. He has to text me. He has to want me. Otherwise, there’s no real point. I’m not sure if there’s much of a point either way.
It’s not something you can relinquish. You have to hold on to it no matter the cost. I had no idea my grip on it was so tenuous. You never realize how fragile you are until you’re already in pieces.
I tell him, commingling lies with truths until the two become vaguely indistinguishable. That’s why I keep coming here, I guess. It’s in this room I can reshape reality into something sensible.
I hate the sound of my footsteps. They indicate my presence in the world. I want to be a thing without mass, devoid of matter, drained of all substance. I want to become nothing.
“Everyone is alone all the time. It doesn’t matter if you want it. You can’t get away from it.”
When I kiss him, it’s like kissing emptiness. There’s no substance, no real texture. He doesn’t taste like anything. Diet Passion. A zero-calorie kiss.
