Beautiful?
Broken and bruised on a cold tiled floor, looking in the mirror with blood on my wrists and salt-licked tears swelling in my eyes. I look at myself and I wonder how everything became so miserably fucked. I once saw you at 6 years old, your long locks of healthy golden hair and tiny little fingertips. I once saw you at 11 when you first went to high school, excitement everywhere, an entire future before you. I saw you at 17 winning school prefix, badge pinned to the left of your blazer, booming full cheeks, proud and jubilant. And then you chased beautiful, in all of the ways you knew how, not just physically, but emotionally and societally. And in the short term, it was beautiful. Yes, beautiful. But now after all of these years, the beauty laid before you is nowhere to be found but as a distant memory of everything that once was and now is so, very, not. Beautiful? No, Darling, not.
Was it beautiful that long Friday night when you cried yourself to sleep, tears slowly leaking from your eyes into a puddle beneath your bedside, broken by the hardship that it was to be labelled a 'disappointment', a 'burden' and a 'shame' to one of the people you love most in the world who now's said they cannot love you any longer? Was it beautiful when the sound of rain seemed silent as the words 'disgrace' and 'manipulator' rattled around in your brain like a hundred jet planes ready on a doomed flight path ready to collide with one another? Was it beautiful when you saw no way out to repair this fractured relationship, despite your ever-so dream of doing so? The horrific, serious, terminal illness inside your brain sees no means of full recovery, the only wish your wounded family members so desperately desire. Was it beautiful when you developed the ever so melancholic notion that many if not most of your family members either most likely loathe you, despise you or, heartbreakingly, hate you? The feeling of this has become like an apple inside your core rotting, alongside all of your organs, shrivelling them up as all that you are decays, moulding, until everything part of you dies, leaving only behind a few cyanide seeds, toxic to anybody who still believes they could love you, fix you, solve your anorexic enigma puzzle.
Did it feel beautiful or ugly when you torturously forced yourself to eat whilst looking in the mirror, words of hate spitting through your broken mind, fracturing the mirror with its cruelty and unkindness? How could you allow yourself to do this? How could you allow yourself to treat yourself with such utter disrespect, humiliation and tormenting when you could never, ever, wish this treatment upon another, friend or foe? To answer my own question, it felt like the ugliest of ugly behaviour I'd ever engaged in and I cried, in despair, the entire time. For what life have I succumb to? What exception of humanity in a parallel universe was I? What had I allowed myself to become? Were some of the questions I wondered out of what I can remember of an experience I've now mostly blocked out.
Was it beautiful, Dolls, when your body began to deteriorate alongside your mind? Was it beautiful as the pale green leaves highlighted before the golden sun disappeared amidst the background of the world that converted into complete blinding white, the air going directly to the space between your brain and your skull, dizziest of the dizzy, most fearsome of every last fear? Was it beautiful when the pins and needles electrified through every vein, the tips of every last toe and finger tingling like a thousand bee stings, zap, zap, zing? Was it beautiful when your bladder became lazy, back to primitive ages when you were reliant on the care of an adult but now you were an adult too and it was just lonely, pathetic and shameful? Is that beautiful? If yes, then you are out of your fucking mind. No parent is here to save you, you are the only saviour left for yourself.
Did it feel beautiful or did it break your heart into a million little pieces when you could feel the life you wanted, slip away as fast as you were professing it? When everything you wanted and more was at your fingertips, attained, having it, but you had the increasing premonition that you wouldn't, not for long? Did that feel beautiful? No, it felt fucking terrifying, soul-destroying, gut-wrenching. It was a vicious cycle your decaying brain had begun to know as of recently.
And I spent half the time hoping it was all in my head. But, darling, that's the problem, it is.
Beautiful is a complicated enigma in the world as it currently is, let alone a world where anorexia exists. Navigating a medium between placing importance upon it and placing none upon it at all is a grey area with which few lucky ones have come to find contentedness. Oh, may I find my contentedness with beautiful one day soon.
Kisses,
COS x
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