Anorexia… Anorexia
A death word
A pain word.
I never want to hear it again!
Never want to speak it, never want to
See it
Again.
But I must
I must hear it now,
I must speak it,
Relive it again
For you.
To tell you the pain it causes
The hearts it breaks.
The pain.

Best Friend.
Not anymore. A New Her.
‘Best friend’ is slipping away…
Descending to darkness.
The darkness called
“Im fat”
“Im ugly”
“No one likes me.”
Pain.
It has many names.

Best friend, pulling away.
She is leaving me
Where is she going?
Into the darkness.

“Am I fat?”
“No”
“Yes I am!”
She pulls up her shirt
There in the mall
People stop, stare
She arches her back to show the stomach
That does not stick past her ribs
Makes a spectacle of herself
Desperate to prove
She is fat
She is fat
No she is not.
Not really.
Only in her mind
Now a prison.

They send her away
To “fix” her.
They stick a feeding tube in her,
Confine her to bed,
She is just a shell.
A shell of my friend.
My real friend.
Where did my friend go?
My real friend?

She sends a letter to me, there, from her bed,
To her best friend
The P.S. reads “Don’t forget me.”
Like I could forget her!
Like I could get her out of my mind.

I pray.
I pray that my real friend comes back.
From the darkness, from the pain.
Now I am depressed.
I want a New Me.
I feel the darkness,
Where is the light?
But I can’t stop.
A skipped meal here and there,
“Just a couple pounds.”
A New Me.
Now… no. I am not like my friend.
My friend. In the darkness
Who writes “Don’t forget…”

“Just a few pounds,”
“But not like her” I think.
No, I won’t go that far.

But I do.

Now I start to run.
I run physically,
To burn the calories.
Run on an empty stomach
A stomach that cries “feed me!”

But I tell it
“No!”
So I run.
I run mentally,
Away from help
I run to the darkness.
The darkness holds me in its grip
And my stomach growls
But I don’t listen to it.

I get on the scale
“not skinny enough”
5’5” and 95 pounds.
All muscle.
From running.

I plan my day in my head:
I don’t plan
My clothes
My schoolwork
How to help others
How to be a friend
No, I plan my food
All else forgotten.
Don’t eat my breakfast,
“forget” my lunch at home
I won’t eat until dinner
Maybe by Sunday I’ll have lost
My pounds.
My goal
One goal:
Lose weight.
The New Me.

People comment.
They notice The New Me.
I love the attention.
I lose more weight.
Now I weigh myself 2, 3 times
A day.
Sometimes 4.
I am obsessed.
And all the while
The darkness,
The Darkness
Where is the light?


Now, later
I look back on that time of my life
And cry.

My friend is home again, but she is still
A shell. She still does not eat.
She smiles, sometimes,
But it doesn’t reach her eyes.
She laughs, rarely,
But the sound is brittle,
Like glass. About to break.
My friend is gone. Forever maybe.
I don’t know.

I know this: I eat. I am better. I live now.
But I will forever be haunted
By those months of darkness
When there was no light.

All the pain,
All the sadness,
From “Just a few pounds”
I lost my friend, never to return.

So please, do me a favor:

Don’t.
Don’t give in.
Don’t lose “Just a few pounds”
‘Cause it doesn’t work.
Beyond those words there is only
Pain
And
Sadness.