Incandescent.

It was like a lamp, shimmering in the dark agony of being. And I was the moth, drawn to it, propelled by such a complex need. At night when I lay in bed, for the years and months and weeks before I started, listening to my hunger and the voices, it grew before my closed eyes. Without seeing it, I loved it. The temptation and the sheer control of it overcame me. It was like an alarm clock waking me. Always waking me. I would sit up as if there was a gun to my head. When I realized why I had awoken, I truly wished there was. This desire haunted me for so long before I gave in. 1

Who knows what prompted it. Who knows whether I could have avoided it, and, in turn, drastically altered this very day. Who knows why I turned my aching mind first to anorexia and finally to cutting. But somewhere in those summer months of my twelfth year, I caved. While my neighbors stuffed their adolescent selves with the ice creams and chocolate native to June, I crossed my arms over my caved in stomach and pretended I had just eaten. At the picnics native to July, while my family engulfed spreads of potato salad, hot dogs, and soda, I smiled and sipped my weight, confident that I was losing those horrid, dogged pounds separating me from a two-digit weight. In August, when soccer began and I kept blacking out, when I couldn't run, when my hair began to dry and fall out, I tried to remind myself how well my tall frame carried such a depraved, miniscule size. Through the winter, my hipbones and ribs prominent, I could never get warm. But I made it till spring, eating lettuce and water. Grapes and cucumbers if I was lucky. Then there was a death and I resolved that I would not die. That I would stop murdering myself and lying as I picked at my food. 2

It was hell, those first weeks of finally eating. And at times it still is. I want, so desperately, to be hungry all the time again. My body still has not returned to its normal shape. I am mostly bones and most likely will remain like this. Why? Because I am beyond caring. The addiction that prompted this decline in spirit is even more complicated than what I have already related. 3

In the first months of starvation, I developed a habit of wearing a rubber band on my wrist and snapping it when I became hungry. Within a day or two, red lines and welts circled my arms. Within a month or three, I needed more pain. So I began hurting myself. Just poking, stabbing my arm with a safety pin [oh, the irony.] every now and then. But soon it got better? worse? Because I found that that pain, that blood relieved more than my hunger. It numbed the inescapable pain for a moment. It ceased the paradoxical, coexisting numbness for a moment. It gave me lucidity in my writing and an extension, an expression of how I felt inside. 4

There is not much else to say, I suppose. There have been a few suicide attempts. Alot of dissociation. Innumerable lies. I dread the summer that most people long for, and thrive in the aloneness that everyone seems to evade. But in all of it, for all the three years, and even before that, the worst part has being the isolation. My mind is fucked, if you haven't noticed yet. I push away most everyone who cares even a bit. But I still wonder why I am alone. I hate myself with a vengeance. But still, I wish someone would love me. So that is my story, my life so far, if one wishes. My apologies for having to read it.