| always you. |
soundtrack - jennifer paige: get to me.
monday: was a very bad day. granted, i gave myself a lie in. i could not be bothered with the stupid waste of time that has become GS. andy is a great teacher and he sparks off really great debates, the whole thing is just so great great great, and my mind is wandering off outside the perimetres trying to stretch itself so wide that the thoughts stop billowing up inside of me like clouds of smoke. i feel it relevant to mention that i felt confident physically as well as mentally/emotionally on monday. i was wearing my baggy black jeans and my red-wine small hoodie, and i felt attractive, but of course, not pretty; never pretty. hands never small enough, nails never clean enough, skin never radiant, eyes never sparkling sufficiently for me to stop questing for the perfect look. As always, my legs were too big, my arms were too big and too small at the same time, my jaw too defined and yet not defined enough, i could count my ribs from the outside when i breathed in, but i wanted to count them outside the sweater i was wearing; all in all, i was taking up far too much university space; it wasn't that i had to be thinner, i just generally thought on monday - and every day, i think it - that maybe i can fast and starve and puke long enough for my legs to just disappear, and then they'll be thin enough, and i'll be thin enough, and i won't be imposing upon the universe with my great big fat clumsly huge human-like form, what with its needs and desires and wimpering in the darkness. but still, monday was a good day, to begin with. it was foggy and misty when i woke up, and even after i'd showered, put on make-up (make-up. i never wear it. yet i managed black eyeliner underneath my eye to define, and pink on the top, so the whole effect i thought was actually quite nice, in a sort of you-can't-miss-these-eyes variety), played with my hair, put on matching socks (another abnormality. i go out of my way to find socks that don't match. matching socks is so normal, dammit.) the mist still hung around. i left the house and sang to myself, because i was free in the mist, cloaked and covered and soaked almost immediately to the skin, but completely invisible, and students rode past me on their bikes their parents bought them and still i sang, shyly and quietly at first, as though my mere breath would have the ripple effect and a monkey would fall off a tree somewhere, causing a natural disaster of conker explosions or god knows what. i arrived at college, went in to the computer bit, - after checking my hair wasn't too much of a fog-induced mess, which it wasn't - and aluin (the guy i did have a big huge impossible crush on) arrived. he sat next to me and said, 'hey'. my skin crackled. he shot a look at me sideways, and then looked again. 'there's something different about you today'. i sat silent, disturbed. my skin trembled. 'you're wearing make-up! wow! must be out to impress somebody today! ooh, back in a tic' and there he was gone, the very guy i was trying to impress, chasing the tail of another girl. another girl who didn't like him, hated him, him and his chasingness, his perpetual niceness, and me, sat with my freshly combed hair and cheeks pink with a girl crush and outside air. i looked down at my thighs, and squeezed them together. the muscles ached from hunger and over exercise but they were still too big altogether, too much there, too visible, too alive. sat in the canteen later, he begged to buy me chocolate, whilst i buried my face in my hands, no, no, i can't, i'm sorry, i just can't. he offered me a shoulder and i damn near fell asleep, cuddled against him, infantile, ugly but sleepy and cocooned somewhere inside my head. the girl from earlier sat across from us and grinned at me, chewing chocolate in small, nervous bites, birdlike hands flickering like air on the tabletop. we left the canteen and i leant on aluin for support, feeling dead, and he said, 'help! she's attatched herself to me!' and god i wanted death, right then, right now, oh please precious concrete ground which i walk on every day, have your revenge, swallow me, i beg you, you have to, right now. so i attatched myself to the arm of the girl, lu, and aluin immediately looked perplexed. he held out an arm to me, and i linked in to it, and there i was, sandwiched between the boy i crushed on and the girl he crushed on. my lungs imploded on themselves. tiny squadrons of stabbing icemen crawled over my skin and poked at my eyelids. bastards. we got to the computer place. we sat down on chairs, swingy, swirly chairs, and spun, and talked, and i said how i wanted to go home all the time, just for hugs. let me note that aluin is my hug monkey. he gives me hugs on tap, or he used to. this time, not this time. 'anyone want to give her a hug? no? aww... shaaame...' he said, looking around, and then smiling at me, a sneering smile. i felt confused. i floundered. what? small brain confused. small brain imploding on itself. he turned to the girl and talked to her for a long while before leaving without saying goodbye. i sat, frozen. fat and frozen. i spent the evening, until 10pm, wandering around in the dark misty foggyness, i couldn't see my hand in front of my face, i couldn't see the smoke i spat into the cold night air, i couldn't even see the red orange ambers of the end of the vocal-chord-lacerating cigarette or three that i smoked in succession. i couldn't see me. that was all that mattered. that night, i didn't sleep, i drank coffee, and wrote essays, and played computer games, and watched football, and dozed surrounded by mad voices and mad people wanting me to vomit, even though there was nothing to vomit. so hungry, the bile rose to my throat anyway, and i lay in fear of myself and what i was/am becoming. tuesday: i lay in bed, tired, exhaused even, dragged down by the sunken hollows in my cheeks and under my eyes, as i tried to convince my body that yes, i was serious, and we had to get out of bed right or the world would just stop turning so i got out of bed. i showered. showered for the longest time. stared at my scars. picked at the skin. at the wrist scars, at my self, my entirely too-whole self, too there, too real to be fog in the mirror, too ever-present-sick-and-fat-to-the-gills and just too alive. i dressed quickly in my fat clothes - baggier jeans, a big baggy red sports sweatshirt - and didn't bother with my hair. i wrapped my watch around the worst scar as usual and made sure the watch face was underneath my wrist so that it would cover the majority of the scar, no matter what. i got my books together, swore at myself in the mirror, called myself fat to the landlady and left in a flurry, forgetting my jacket on purpose. i sat hungrily through my lessons. i pulled my hair sharply on the left side of my head until it hurt, too small a handful for anyone to see, too tight a handful for it not to make my eyes sting with dispicable pain and weakness. the damage done to the friendships i acquired early on in college is beyond repair, and i sat, solitary in tutor, with no one left, a mess of my own making, and i thought, 'fuck this'. i left tutor, and lu asked me to go to tesco with her. we got there, and we both said at the same time, 'god, i want to binge' so we bought binge food. she bought triple chocolate cookies and a pack of three mayonnaise-filled sandwiches and i got chocolate, two of the huge bars that you buy for people on their birthday and they're supposed to last a week but with us bingers, last a few minutes. then, satisfied, we made our way back to college, and sat under the stairs in our usual gathering spot - it has become usual, it seems - with elle, fee - who have become attatched at the hip and i feel sorry for that, because elle really is quite annoying at times (aren't we all, i'm supposed to say, but i'm not going to, because she's annoying as fuck) and lu and i ate our binge foods. i offered the chocolate shyly around but consumed the first bar within five minutes. i started on the second bar, and elle watched me, bright eyed and shocked. 'that's your second bar!' and i thought, yeah, and? why are you telling me this? and it made me even more furiously bent on consuming the entire two bars before i could stop. i finished binging roughly the same time that lu did, although she left for the toilet before i did. i sat crossed legged on the floor and i thought, hell, i can do this. i can let my stomach sit with all this badness inside it for just ONE fucking DAY and i won't turn into a fat blimp overnight, i'll get a pimple maybe, but i'll be alright, i'll be ofuckingkay. then i leapt up and went running for the toilets at the other end of the college. i puked it all up like a good girl til blood came up, and it kept coming up, and my eyes were streaming and my fingers were coated in blood, and i felt like dying. i cleaned my face off, breathed, but you could see the signs very visibly today: watery eyes, very red lips, flushed cheeks - i looked raw, raw and wripped open and dealt with and spat back onto the ground, and salted over. i walked back to the group, and sat down as if nothing had happened. i actually think i got away with it. my heart began to feel funny during psychology. and i kept thinking, god, i want help, god, i want out of this, and this is the perfect place to ask for help, because christ, shit, they know what to do, they know the cure all, please fucking tell me there is a fucking cure all. but i didn't say anything, except brought my hand to my head 1950s style and said 'oh my, my heart, i think i'm having a heart attack'. i breathed very fast. i couldn't breathe at all for a while. it felt so scary and odd and i kept thinking, i'm not small enough for this, i'm not fucking DONE yet, don't take this away from me, don't hurt me, don't do this, please, just one more day, one more week, one more chance, just to get fucking THIN and everything will be okay. everything. will. be. one day. |
