#thighgap (My Dark Library Book 2)

by Chandler Morrison

"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.

he asks me if I came. I lie and tell him I did because I don’t want to deal with male insecurity right now.

I like the rumbling; I like to imagine it’s the sound of my organs eating each other, reducing the mass of my body.

I don’t like being cornered into discussions about food. I’d rather pretend food doesn’t exist.

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.

It’s all a reminder of how unnatural my lifestyle is, that I’m defying my body’s needs in order to be something more than human. Something better.

I’d make it all the way through dinner and up to bedtime without giving in to my desire for garbage food. But then I’d be lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, obsessing. No matter how full my stomach was from dinner, it would twist and growl and insist on its fallacious emptiness. And so, inevitably, I’d end up in the kitchen after my parents had gone to sleep, and I’d gorge myself on snacks. Many times, I’d cry while I ate, looking at the thin bodies of my classmates in the sexy pictures they posted on Instagram.

The thing is, no one ever stopped being disgusted by fat people. Men still didn’t want to fuck them. It was nothing more than one more lie to hide the ugly truth—that skinny is Good and fat is Evil.

I knew being thin was the ideal.

Ugly people aren’t happy. The ones who claim to be are either lying, or they’re too stupid and lazy to know there’s something better.

The longer, in fact, I went without eating, the higher I felt. It made me into a god. Seated me upon a pedestal I’d before thought unreachable. I’d never known control before; tasting it for the first time was better than any food I’d ever put in my mouth.

As the pounds fell off, I could feel everyone beginning to look at me in a new light.

Something about this girl’s ethereal flawlessness, her perfect proportions, her symmetry—it’s too much. It makes me not enough, and in such a way that I’m suddenly, profoundly certain I’ll never be enough. That, no matter what, I will never look as good as she does, and that because of this, everything is a waste.

“Beauty is the only commodity that matters,”

You never realize how fragile you are until you’re already in pieces.

I haven’t been to the doctor in I don’t know how long because I guess I’ve been sort of afraid of what they’ll tell me. But...what if I’m, you know...killing myself with my behavior?

I can’t. I don’t want to die, but I’d choose death before I’d choose the slug. I’d choose death every time.”

She’s quite pretty, too, if a little old and somewhat run-down. She must be at least thirty, and maybe even a few years past that.

Lol

You’ve bought into the lie, and it’s made you one of its tragic poster girls.”

I blink at him, dumbfounded. How could he be leaving with her when I’m right here? I’m the beautiful one. I’m the skinny one. This bitch doesn’t even have a thigh gap.

I look at the ground so far below and wonder what it would feel like to fall. I wonder if I already know.

“Sometimes I feel like you hate me,” I say. “And other times I feel like you love me. I can’t figure out which one it is. I can’t figure out if it makes any difference.”