Perhaps this picture is cruel. I baked, ate and digested those cupcakes without guilt. Later that day, I sat in a cupboard and cried because that night I had told my boyfriend I was in love with him. Nothing and everything has changed. As I lay awake my tears running over his arms listening to his gentle snoring I remembered this blog and all the pain and the hunger and the sadness which fuelled everything I've written here.
I don't starve anymore - I've forgotten what intentional hunger is, what guilt feels like, what it is to be obsessed with food, utterly, totally absorbed into my experience of that hunger. Ironically, my life is a lot more empty. There is nothing as all consuming as self-loathing. Stability is oddly, pleasingly hollow.
I went travelling again - I watched countless sunrises above exotic rooftops all the while clinging to the idea of the boy at home who loved me and waited for my return.
"What should I have said before I left and you told me you were falling in love with me was that I wasn't just falling in love with you, I am in love with you."
"I felt that way before you left. I don't feel that way anymore."
Said so kindly.
So that love I chase with such desperation and longing isn't here either. How do you ask someone for a predicted time frame in which they expect to fall in love with you? And how long do you wait? Or does one just disintegrate with the knowledge that you were once loved but that too just faded?
Disintegration, fading, dissolving, disappearing. My old words. Comfortable in their sense of self-annihilation. One thing I learned from reading these blogs is that every anorexic has to grow up or they die from malnutrition, osteoporosis, organ failure or any number of other self-imposed death sentences slowly and without dignity. My mum told me about a family friend who now weighs 29kg. Even in the old days that number would have been shocking. And still part of me is envious that she got so thin - her family was shocked when she told them how the other girls in her hospital ward (when she came off life support) interrogated her for tips. The doctor told her mum she would probably die. Maybe she'll recover and give inspirational talks at schools about she was cured and returned to sanity. Or maybe she'll linger in a sort of no-man's-land suspended somewhere between starvation and bingeing, obsessed but unable to disappear and that will be her life.
I'd take normality, sanity, peace any day. I was looking for a metaphor for anorexia the other day and finally settled on poison. The slow, lingering, incurable poison that won't kill but refuses to let you die, that you can't treat, you can't beat but you just steadily refuse to acknowledge, you suppress, you reject, you ignore and yet are unable to fix, to cure or to purge. This is how I describe my recovery, my recovery of sorts.
