Something I'm Writing.

This is just something I'm writing. I like to keep all my creative stuff together so please don't mind that I'm putting it here. It's in installations, and I'll update it when I feel like it.

1.

It was a sunny afternoon and I was sitting on the grass at school with my friends. We had just finished eating lunch and now were lying on the grass, making pleasant conversation in the heat. It was sunny and hot, making us lazy. I felt curiously happy and content. We were at the beginning of summer, and it looked to be a glorious one. A girl stood up. She was in my class but we weren't that close and I didn't know her so well. She had been bickering with someone in the corner, and now she rose, a tall, thin figure outlined in the sun. Then she turned and ran toward the building. I stood too.
"Leave her," her friends said,"she just wants attention. She wants you to think she's throwing it up. She's not really." I went after her anyway.

I found her in the bathroom. She was in one of the stalls. I could hear her retch in her throat, hear the splash as her lunch hit the bowl, hear it slop into the water. I pushed open the stall door. Calmly she turned and looked at me.
"Show me." I demanded. And so she did. She stood there patiently as I clumsily followed her example, until my lunch was mixed with hers in the toilet. I straighted up.
"So it's that simple." I said. She nodded. We waited for a while until our eyes were no longer red and watery, and then we walked back together to join our friends in the sun.

For months afterward we met in that bathroom after lunch. Two young girls, not yet teenagers, joined together in the fight to be pure.

I asked her one day, "wouldn't it be easier to just not eat in the first place?". She shrugged. I could choose my methods, she had chosen hers.

That was the beginning.

2.

That girl has recovered now. She's popular and pretty and thin. She has moved onto other things: drugs, alcohol, sex. Leaving me, feeling childish, to continue our fight to be pure alone. But every now and again we have days where it goes back to how it used to be.

"He dumped me"
"Oh God, when?"
"Last night. I just feel so fat."

So maybe she hasn't quite left it behind.

"I'm fasting right now." I offer out a solution. Like she knew I would.
"I'll join you. How long are we fasting for?" She accepts. Like I knew she would.
"Until Saturday? How about 11am. That will be 60 hours."
"Great."

I haven't eaten properly for quite a while. Not since I fell in love. But I don't want to tell her that, I know how competitive she can be.

"How much weight should I lose?"

Even though we're on msn I can hear the whine in her voice.

"You don't need to lose any. You know that."
"But I do. I'm fat. I want to see bones."

This is when I start to worry about her. She wants to see bones. That sounds like the sort of thing she used to say. But she promises me she's better now.

She really doesn't need to lose weight. She's one of the thinnest in our class. I tell her 5lb. No more. I'll aim for 5lb too.

And then it's back to the old routine. She chose her methods, I chose mine. But recently I just needed someone to be close to, so I joined her on these days in our old bathroom, to try and force up whatever I had allowed myself. I would have rather not eaten in the first place, but I wanted to be the same as someone else, just once. I was rather out of practice but I liked to hear the delight in her laugh when she got up more than me, liked to watch her teach me again. She never got out of practice.

But all good things come to an end. Yet again I watched her wipe her mouth and say

"Well that's over now."
"You're over him?"
"Yeah."

We never did compare how much weight we'd lost. It wasn't about weight. It was about getting over boyfriends and sisterhood. I envied her, how she had ultimate control over what she does. How she can choose who to be. I watched her walk away from me yet another time and I sighed.

For me at least, it continues.

3.

When I was fourteen I fell in love. At least, it felt like love at the time, now I look back and I realize it wasn't true love. I was young and insecure, it didn't take much for me to become obsessed with him. It felt like a storybook beginning. We met at a charity evening. He was helping, so was I. I looked up and saw him across the bar, staring at me. Our eyes met. He smiled his beautiful, easy smile, a smile that will always speak a million words to me. I turned to check that he wasn't looking at someone behind me. He must of thought I was avoiding his gaze because when I looked round again he had taken another platter of food and moved off, disappearing easily into the crowd of noisy middle-aged couples.

I saw him again later though. His limbs moved with a certain grace that only someone who is completely comfortable in his body can posses. The minute I saw him I became acutely aware of how disjointedly I moved. It's a feeling that never dulled while I was in his presence, but I came to love it, came to enjoy feeling every muscle in my body when I shifted. At least, I loved it when I was with him.

He walked past me and I felt his fingers brush mine. A note. I put down the platter of food I was carrying and hurried to a corner where I could read it.

Meet me somewhere quiet.

It read. And scrawled at the bottom was another sentence.

Your eyes speak to me.

He was watching me from across the room. I nodded my head to the door and walked toward it. The cool night air hit my face, but I wasn't cold. I looked down at my body, wishing it were thinner, better. I became aware of a warmth at my back; I turned around. He was taller than me, and he stood so close that I had to look up. My nose brushed his chin and we both shivered at each other's touch. He smiled again, and this time I smiled back.

The heat from his body was making me want to draw closer, and I couldn't stop staring at his lips, wondering what they felt like. I had never felt like this before. I had spent my teenage years so far wrapped up in a blanket of food and bathrooms and calories. I was looking so far into his eyes it hurt. He bent his head and placed his lips on mine. The kiss tingled through my body and made me feel alive. We paused only to look at each other again, and whisper our names in each other's ears. His lips lit a fire inside me.

The evening finished soon after that. I gave him my phone number and we parted, his fingers lingering on mine just that second longer, so that as I walked home I could still feel them on my palm.

It felt like the classic teenage boy-meets-girl story. Our friends teased us each separately but we didn't mind. And such teasing melted into background white noise the second we saw each other. Usually teasing really got to me, made me insecure and worried, but with him I was whole, and nothing else mattered.

Soon people grew tired of our burning romance, and of hearing about him from me. Whenever I wasn't with him I had to fold my love up and store it in a corner of my heart. But my chest felt about to burst with the love it was holding; no one ever told me how heavy and tiring it was to love.

When I was fourteen I fell in love. And when I was fourteen I had my heart torn into pieces and burnt with the very fire his lips had lit. I never told anyone why it ended. People asked and I just mumbled "it didn't work out".

I remember the last time I saw him. He walked away from me, leaving my hand dangling by his side, still feeling the imprint of his fingers on my palm. Later that hand took apart a plastic razor. Later that same hand, shaking, dragged that razor across my body until blood dripped everywhere, mixing with tears until I couldn't tell the difference. Later that hand cleaned the cuts and covered them with gauze. I swore never to love again.

When I was fourteen I fell in love. At least, it felt like love at the time. But soon the cut healed and became just another scar. Just another scar. I loved that scar once.

4.

I was sitting in the kitchen, coloring. Drawing one of those impossibly thin girls that children often draw. I was a child, six years old, yet I was different, even then. My disproportioned, emaciated drawings stood out from my peer's, entitled "Wishful Thinking".

I was slowly, carefully coloring her long hair to match her eyes when my mother hurried in her room. She held her hands out delicately. "Look," she whispered, "look what I have. It's a robin's egg. I found it in the garden". I stretched out my pudgy fingers, attempting to see with them.

She cradled her hands away from me. "Careful," she scolded, "you'll break it". She always expected me to break everything. Always wanted to protect the world from me. She never thought to protect her own child.

"Mummy I won't break it." I said. "OK," she relented, "hold out your hands." She tipped the fragile shell into my chubby fingers. I brought my hands closer to my face, wanting to fall into that clear blue. It was the color of a newborns eyes.

"Darling!" called my father, an unseen voice. My mother looked at me, sighed, and then hurried out the room. I was left alone, a silent six year old, standing in the middle of the kitchen.

I looked down at my hands and slowly folded them together. I felt the broken shell cut into my palms and smiled. I guess in the end I will always become what my mother expects me to be.