Everybody has a story. This is mine. It’s the story of my body, my starvation. Pictures of hollow checks, ribs stabbing at the flesh, legs shakenly holding a frail corpse. Demons are like vultures picking at dead flesh, muscle, fat, anything that conceals bones. Why choose starvation, why choose the fate that would cause one to be envied as a woman after being a victim?
It’s an addiction, people that starve themselves get hooked fast. You learn fast that your body only needs water, and food is only an accessory to waste time, as your frame wastes away.
Hopes, that if I made myself small my body would be safe from the eyes of preying vultures. Confessions? What is there to confess as someone no one sees nor notices missing meals goes unnoticed. Pride. That is what you get from those closest to you, envy as your friends turn foes with newfound desire in their lover’s gaze. Happiness. Everyone is happy for someone who looks healthy on the outside, while withered on the inside, slim in our culture is the golden standard.
Staving wasn’t a choice but a must and one I welcomed with open arms. It fought off the demons but became the devil. The unwelcome, and unforeseen curse. For months of feeding it, it took. I made the deal and struck a bargain. By indulging in it I didn’t realize I set in motion a time glass. A time glass that set-in motion a time stamp on my death.
Everyone loves you until it’s noticed and even then, it goes unnoticed. If you can keep up with the daily mundane tasks, you are fine. Body broken, heartbroken, moral broken, mind broken, soul shattered none of that matters as you are the object and catalyst women crave. Why would anyone need to worry?
How did I get this way? Well, I was a survivor not a victim. My body used to be plump, filled with curves, filled with things men desired, men that liked to take not ask. So, they took and kept taking until the unscathed girl was a maimed woman.
Starving wasn’t a choice. It was euphoric. I discovered the high of fasting after the incident. My body was on autopilot without a soul to operate it and forgot to feed. Hunger is only a mindset. Your body doesn’t need food like the doctors preach. And when it doesn’t have it, after the hunger subsides, you’re on a high. It’s better than any feeling you’ve felt. Your alert, awake, but most of all you forget. Sleep becomes less needed. Less sleep means being alone less and being alone less means less time with your thoughts.
Soon, my form was like most girls my age, slim, flat, and uninteresting. Even if I was slim, men’s sinful gazes weren’t drawn to my form like before I was undetectable. No plump full breast, no curvy hips, or thick thighs with a full ass seen as high valued prey. Just flat, narrow, small, unseen.
I was dying. Well, we are all dying. But I sped up the clock. With my new body, came pain. Headaches, chills, nausea, tiredness, and sickness. My immune system was non-existent. My body was constantly cold, as any draft bit into my bones. And common headaches became never-ending migraines, that no caffeine fix or medication could cure. My salvation became my damnation.
Commending myself as a survivor of thieves that stole my innocence only to be taken by my own creation. I did this to myself, got addicted to the high. Got attached and craved for the body that was unnoticed from men that stalked within the shadows of the night. The cost crept up on me. An unseen stalker in the night that was always their watching. Until now. I became my own thief, robbing myself of everything that kept me breathing.
A corpse, that is what I had become. I served my purpose I was no longer an object of desire of men. But now an object of repulsion. I was repulsed by my own self. The living corpse that is what I should be named, when I die. But I don’t want to die. I was faced with my own mortality and morbidity.
Desperate, to flip the hourglass. Strike a new bargain. Welcome the demons as long as the grim reaper parted. I began to devour everything but couldn’t keep anything down. I was too late; the reaper had come and was knocking on the other side of the fragile cracked door. I shoved anything I could in front of that door, choking on food, but the door kept on cracking.
Then it cracked, cleaved in two. I became face to face with my maker. Only there was no devil or reaper to abduct me. I was face to face with the person that sealed this fate, and it was me.
