Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing - Sylvia Plath

I fucked up again.

I went to visit the Beautiful One (remember her? My impossibly beautiful best friend from school - the one all the boys were obsessed with) and we ended up getting very drunk at a house party. This was the third time I've been up to stay with her so I know all her (mostly male) friends quite well and things felt amazing - being surrounded by attractive men buzzing I remembered what it felt like to be the centre of attention. Mine and the Beautiful One playing our roles to her perfection - the men swarming around her, she smiles and pulls me to her in front of everyone and kisses me hard on the mouth to the alcohol soaked cheers of her friends. She goes into some dark corner to flirt with a guy, I start flirting with the nearest guy.
Minutes later, I'm leading him to the nearest empty room - the bathroom. Then we're stripping, he's lying on the floor, I'm kissing him against the wall. We can hear people banging on the door, yelling, we laugh hysterically. Then we emerge and I go to the Beautiful One's room to collect my stuff, we're all going out but the Beautiful One won't look at me and then she turns to me in front of all her friends -
You just fucked my ex-boyfriend.
Everyone leaves - I follow them. See the boy in the club - Nothing happened I whisper, he nods. But the Beautiful One won't look at me, won't talk to me, and her male friends are lining up to shout 'you filthy cunt' & 'treacherous slut' at me. The low point was crying on the pavement outside the club as the bouncer gave me a hug. And then the Beautiful One's house mate comes to my rescue and she takes me  back to the house, and we weep in the kitchen as I tell her about my eating disorder and how I felt that the Beautiful One just didn't care and that it was the only way to validate myself as worthy of being her friend - being thinner than her. And she wept as she told me about her anorexia and we cried together in the kitchen about wanting to disappear.
Then two men strolled in through the front door looking for the after-party - two guys from school who I hadn't spoken to since the end of sixth form. We drunkenly cry some more as we tell them about the whole situation and they invite us back to theirs - I can make my shameful retreat to theirs clutching my possessions. We dance in their living room throwing back shots - the Beautiful One's housemate goes into one of the guy's bedroom, I go into the other. I'd got with all of this guy from school's friends, why not him? We have sex. As we shower, the light is coming through the window, we collapse into bed and in the morning I leave.

The Beautiful One got with my ex, I got with her's.

Her housemate tells me that guy I made out with in the bathroom was not an ex-boyfriend - he was the only man to ever reject the Beautiful One. I feel victorious, and hollow and hungry.

The Beautiful One and I made up today over breakfast, more crying. We're the same person, we couldn't be apart - on this, we agree.