o.
I lean back against the rim of my bed and dig my feet as far into the floor as the carpet will allow. The panic leaves me like an ocean wave, scraping up against the sand of my head and leaving me breathless. I want to hurt something. My arms settle neatly around the other, touching on my wrists, rubbing down my forearms, clenching my hands together.

Someone should have shot me as soon as I made it out of the womb, I think, and my hands settle around my neck.


      p.
Sometimes, I broke.

There were two months where, every Saturday and Sunday, I had Poptarts for breakfast, which is about two hundred calories per individual Poptart. There was an entire month where I ate ice cream every night. The second month after I had started, late September-ish, I found that I couldn't take the hunger for very long, and I would eat a snack before dinner. This ended in mid-October, thankfully, and some of the shame subsided. In December of 2007, when we went to California for winter break, my restraint shuddered and broke, and I ate like I would have, normally, at any Christmas holiday in the past.

I binged three times. The worst was when my father had brought me home a personal pizza from the nearby Italian Pie Company. I ate every last slice, until I could feel the chicken alfredo burning in my stomach, making a mess of my organs. It came back up as white and green, with little blobs of brown. My second binge was also with pizza; less slices, but enough. The third involved Poptarts, an egg salad sandwich, apple slices, corndogs and more Mountain Dew Code Red than I could care to think about. These three were not enough to constitute bulimia, however, and I simply considered them relapses in my self-control.

I always managed to close in, hard, after each of these stumbles. I refused to eat Poptarts, ice cream, or snacks—since I've been on recovery, however, these foods have been making their way steadily back into my life. Liquid fasting became a popular favorite with my brain, scavenging spare calories from caffeine-free root beer and drinking a quarter of my weight in water to keep my stomach feeling full. I vomited until I could not feel my fingers all the way down to my reddened, chewed knuckles.

My main obstacle became my parents: I could not refuse food from them. I could from friends, other family members, my peers, teachers, strangers, even myself; but my parents would offer me food and, no matter how high in fat or steeped in calories it was, I could not say no. All three of my binges would not have happened if they had not been there—I hid my purging well, and they suspected nothing. They had absolutely no reason to believe I could ever possibly have an eating disorder.

My therapist tells me I have shrunk my stomach.  She leans forward. "I am so glad you came to me when you did. If you had waited another month, or two—you might have required hospitalization."

I let this information soak in. "What's wrong with my body?"

She says, "Your appetite is going to be wonky for a long time. You'll want to eat more often, but you'll get full faster, because you have shrunk your stomach. Your metabolism has also been slowed way down and food might make you sick for a while." She pauses, possibly for effect. "Your brain will still show signs of damage—probably some memory loss, and your IQ may have even dropped. The dizziness and fainting spells are probably what has caused all the passing out and stumbling around you get during your panic attacks."

She says, "Your body has been warping to fit what you have done to it."

I ask, "What have I done to it?"

She looks at me for a moment and allows a brief silence before she continues, moving on to solutions, recovery stages, timetables and my parents' involvement. We both know I don't need an answer.


      q.
I like to protect my family in my own small, unassertive ways.

"I'm a big girl," my mother says. She is in the easy chair and I am on the couch. "You have to trust me to handle these things. No more hiding. Okay?"

In therapy she asks to sit in on my session for a few moments. "I know my LeeAnn," she says. "When she goes to Mexico for two weeks at the beginning July, and she has a panic attack, she's not going to tell anybody. Anybody. You can tell her that she needs help and she won't look for it. I mean—what am I supposed to do? You know? We need some kind of plan. She needs some kind of help."

She turns and looks at me slowly, apologetically. "I mean, I'm sorry," she says, "but—I know you."

Someday, I vow, someday I will tell the world. Someday I will confess everything, confess to all of it, and someday I will confess to a world that my mind has shaped and molded but not created. But not yet, I tell myself, those weeks ago in early June. Not yet.

I like to protect my family quietly—silently.


      r.
My new therapist is impressed with my knowledge of mental disorders (psychopathology, by the way: the study of mental disorders). I resist a hardy smile every time I can label a phobia, a technical name, a list of symptoms or a type of therapy.

"Well," she says, "since you're such the researcher-girl, you might've read about this: people with anorexia often don't see what their body looks like, accurately, and—"

"Body dysmorphia," I blurt, and feel like an idiot, but she smiles at me.

"Exactly. LeeAnn, do you think you look healthy?"

I hesitate. "No," I say. "Fat people don't look healthy."

She closes her eyes and sighs, deep and long, like she is storing her breath away for something important. "Is your goal still at 120?"

"Well," I begin, "I'd settle for 130. I mean, it's ten pounds more, but—I was ten pounds away, before. Not since I've gained some weight, but I—I used to be. At 130, I mean, I think I'd be—happier, you know, and that's all I want, is to be—and it can't be so hard, right, I mean just a little more—I don't know, some goddamn purging, or something—"

"LeeAnn," she says, and at first I picture it with an exclamation point at the end, and I think she sounds alarmed, angry, astonished. For a moment I think she is upset that I swore, but then I realize she is none of these things—she is saddened, she is tired, and she is sickened, and not at the "goddamn" I managed to slip in.

She says my name again, "LeeAnn," and a part of me realizes she is pleading, and it stops me.

"It's not really healthy, is it?" I manage, allowing a small laugh.

"I'm going to tell you something, honestly: I think that you are a very tall—what are you, almost six-foot now?—and large-framed person, and the thinness that you have forced upon yourself is unhealthy. I think you're underweight and I think it's a danger to you."

There is a pause before she continues. "What were you thinking while I said that?" Another pause. "Was it—was it that I'm lying to you, just to make you feel better? Was it that—"

"No," I say, quickly, before she can say more. "Not really that, just—just that you don't know what you're talking about, I guess."

I expect her to look hurt, but she doesn't. If anything, she looks excited by this information, this communication—as though it is a breakthrough, and we are opening up new paths and tunnels, or as though the session is finally beginning to get good. "What do you mean by that?"

"Well, I mean, you only see me here, twice a week for an hour," I say. "I'm with me all the time. And I feel the... I feel the weight all the time. And I know it's there, you can't tell me it's not."

"Tell me, when was the last time you looked clearly into a mirror?"

I don't have to think back very far. "Over the weekend," I say. I had been in North Carolina. It was my first weekend of real recovery.

She nods and leans forward in her chair, still talking with her hands. "And what did you see?"

I search for the words. Her eyes are wide and open, prying, and inside of them I can see dark-beetle brown fields, eager and prepared. She is ready for every last thing I have to say to her. She is willing to listen to every confession, analyze all of my worries, help me let go of my body, until all it is will be her and our words and me, wringing my hands and biting the hair off my wrists, sucking on my knuckles and tracing my fingernails on my skin. For the moment, my eating disorder is the most important thing on her mind, the most interesting thing in her life. At the moment I am the biggest, most important figure in the room.

Dr. Carey has never looked at me like this. My parents have never peered at me with such interest. My grown-apart ex-best friend has never watched me so intensely. I have only seen this look once before: my freshman English teacher, when I sat on the floor and he stared at me until I broke into an insecure, ashamed smile. And I'm scared, confused and nervous all over again, my gut welling up and reaching out an intestine arm to strangle me.

I bury my head in my hands and try not to cry in front of my therapist, my shrink. "Too much," I whisper, and I fight back all of the sounds in my throat, all of the little quiet particles of anger. "I saw too much."


      s.
I lost more than weight. My trust in myself, my sense of time, some spare IQ points, my concentration and focus. I lost the color in my skin and the thickness I might have posessed in my hair, once. I lost the ability to think about other things and the idea of being satisfied. I lost close friends and whatever spine I may have been developing at some point.

But in the end I was afraid I would lose my name—that it would be replaced with Fat Somehow-Anorexic Disturbed Panic Attack Girl. But my name is LeeAnn, my name has always been LeeAnn, since before I began to restrict and purge, since before I began to crawl into corners and wreak havoc with my insides: LeeAnn. It's not a particularly beautiful name and everyone seems to spell it wrong, but it's there, transparent and written all over my skin, and I am determined to keep it.

There is a section on the last page of my school agenda that says I have anorexia nervosa five different ways. I wrote it in sixth period the day of my diagnosis. Sometimes, I think it helps keep me alive, like a second heartbeat echoing after the real one. Sometimes, I think it will be the end of me, spin me around and turn me into another suicide case, another complication of starvation.

Sometimes, I read it.


      t.
"Mom," is how I begin.

She looks at me patiently, her hands folded inside one inside the other, all the fingers tangling together to form a piled mass of skin. She blinks once, twice. I wonder if she is excited, apprehensive, nervous, scared—terrified, does she look terrified?

"Do you remember," I continue, "the other day, when we were talking about eating disorders, and I said, hypothetically, you know, what if I had one and—and you asked me if I was trying to tell you something?"

No shock yet. I can't bear to pause. I keep talking, too quickly.

"Well," I say. "I'm sorry for lying."

She frowns and her eyebrows frown with her. Close my eyes: breathe, in and out, sucking through your teeth, carbon monoxide and hydrogen and air, air, air. Tell them, my brain whispers, echoing into a scream. Tell them!

Breathe.

"Because I was trying to tell you something."


      u.
When the phone rings and Christiane's father's name appears on the ID, I scramble to pick it up, throwing it against my ear.

"Hello?"

"LeeAnn?"

"Hello!"

"Dude, you sound the same."

"Christiane, it's been six months."

"Still!" she says, laughing, and in my head, I can see her melting honey-brown eyes, her blond-white hair pulled back in a bun, and I can see her sitting next to me in our private school clothes back in California only a year earlier. At first, we talk about trivial things: when we each got out of school (me: a week earlier than she gets out), how we think we each did on our finals (my 83 on my math final; her terror at her French one), and a brief bout where we compare the south to California (she grew up in Texas).

Then, she stops, and I stop, instinctively. "LeeAnn," she exhales, and loses whatever words she might've wanted to say afterwards.

"Christiane," I breathe overdramatically, mockingly. I can hear her roll her eyes over the telephone.

"So when did you... you know, find out?"

I blanch. I know exactly what she is referring to. "Not too long ago."

My voice has suddenly dried up, lost of all substance. I continue to talk anyway, and not too long later, I'm babbling. "I'm—I'm sorry, you know, that I told Paige first. I mean, I wasn't trying to hurt you, and it's not like I like her better or something. I just, I, uh, I know that you are like me in that we both—we both have body issues, and I knew that if I told you, it would affect you more than it affected Paige, because Paige is a stick and has never—struggled with—well, and because of that, because I knew you would be affected, I wanted to tell you more, and at the same time, that made it harder to tell you—does that make any sense?"

"Yes. Yeah, that makes sense."

"It's all been kind of a shock, you know? I mean, I sort of gave up during California, but when I came back to school and everything, in January, suddenly I had it worse than ever."

"I know! Paigey and I were totally surprised. When we saw you in California, you looked a little thinner, but like—it wasn't huge or anything. You looked... basically the same. We couldn't tell at all."

Silence.

"Did Paigey—I mean, did she tell you about it? Before I told you?"

"No." Pause. "Well, she told me that there was something you wanted to tell me, something important. She kept crying and it got me all worried. So then I emailed you, and you told me, and... well, here we are."

I breathe too loudly in shock, and I blush, talking to cover it up. "I made Paigey... cry?"

"Well, yeah."

"How did I—? I mean, Paige doesn't cry. She just doesn't."

"To be honest, after you told me, I cried, too," she says.

"...What? Christiane!"

"We didn't want you to die, LeeAnn," and she sounds like she's on the verge of laughing, or crying some more—I can no longer tell the difference. "We don't want you to die."

I look around and realize I have maneuvered myself into the corner of my room, between my closet door and my desk, and I kick at some books I have left on the floor. My toe-bones stretch out and are clearly defined on my foot, and there are little bumps all along my bruising veins. "Well, that makes two of us," I say, stupidly. "Er—three of us?"

"So," she says, ignoring me. "Tell me about it. I want to know everything you're willing to tell me. Go."

I laugh, shallowly. "Well, I feel that I should warn you," I tell her, hiding under my sarcasm voice. "Grab some food, a pillow, and a lighter. You're in for the long haul."

"A lighter?"

"Well, you know, if you need to set the phone on fire. Maybe a wooden stake, too, and some silver. I hear that's the only proper way to kill me. Sometimes, you have to do what you have to do, Christiane."

"Are you all right?"

"Did that make me sound like Indiana Jones? All hardcore? You gotta do what you gotta do, Christiane," I repeat, making my voice as deep and masculine as possible. "You know, when I talk about—about my recovery, I feel like some sort of Alexander the Great, you know? And after Persia, I shall conquer Anorexia, and—"

"What the hell—"

"Oh come on, you love my vocal talent. How I can switch from Indiana Jones to Alexander the Great spot on—"

"—LeeAnn—"

"Wouldn't that be a great name for a capital city? LeeAnn...exandria? LeeAnnexandria? Who needs South Carolina and Texas and California when there could be a LeeAnnexandria out there? I conquer this land in the name of LeeAnnexandria—"

"God, you are such a goofball—"

"Goofball? Oh, the comeback! Do the kids on the playground know about you, Christiane?"

"LeeAnn, if you don't stop, I will be using the lighter for other purposes."

"Ooh! Look at Christiane! I leave for six months and she's already into bullying, telephonic threats, and pyromania. Christiane, if—if you joined a telephone gang, you would tell me first, right?" She snorts and I can't help but continue; anorexia is now the furthest thing from my mind. "I love how, in places like New York, they have actual gangs, but if you go to nerdy old California, you get telephone gangs! Oh, the terror you guys must instill in your enemies!"

Once more I can hear her roll her eyes as she says, "Oh, LeeAnn, how I missed your corny jokes. I'll let my telephone gang know what you think of them. But no—no more stalling. Tell me, now," and I suddenly feel emptied and secured all at once; the idea of confronting it makes my stomach churn, but the way she speaks, assertive and eager, is comforting.

Her voice reminds me of our middle school days, sitting on the bench with her face half-buried in a book while Paige and I talked eagerly, and every once in a while she would pop her head up and roll her eyes or add in something sarcastic, and I would tease her for being an over-the-top Republican and Paige would bubble up into laughter, and I would forget, for a while.

"Okay," I say, remembering, inhaling deeply and speaking over the exhale.

"No jokes?" she says.

I crack a smile. "I'll try."


      v.
I decide that I am not screwed over.

However, I figure that if I had a three-year-old child, an abusive father and a verbally intense boyfriend, I could make a hit autobiographical film that would be featured on a Lifetime Saturday special in a heartbeat, maybe for years to come. They drool over this kind of pain.

I don't know, I thought—I thought I would get used to it. I thought eventually my stomach would become familiar with hunger, maybe even like it, love it a little. That my shrinking breasts would learn to accustom to the feeling of my ribcage peeking out below it, like two fat, sharp-nailed tiger paws. That my stomach would learn to embrace its new curved hipbones; that I would get used to the dizzy spells, the seeping purple that would shade my eyes, the weakness in my knees and ankles and thighs, the skeletal terror in my heart—that I might even begin to enjoy, somehow, the fainting and bruising. But the only thing I got used to was the taste and feeling of flesh down my throat, pulling out ropy line by thick ropy line of puke and water and spit—my flesh, mine.

I would shut my eyes and imagine that someday, this story would be inspiring. In my head I could see myself as someone with a huge, wonderful, awed story to tell—about me as a teenager, conquering anorexia nervosa, panic attacks, anxiety, depression, and self-injury, all of which came on at once—and it would be amazing, and coated with imagery and witty dialog, and people would tilt their heads back and cry and laugh and wonder what to do with themselves when it was over, because my story was so fucking inspiring.

I have gotten over this image, though it still lingers somewhere, touching on the very back of my head, where my neck meets and grips my hair. It waits for me, for its day, longingly. But I shut my eyes and know it will not come.

No, I decide, I am not screwed over. This is fixable, open for recovery—repair. This is a problem to be solved, a possibility to make happen. No, I am not screwed over; no, no, no.

Fucked up, maybe. But I am going to make this right.


      w.
As I am getting better, I have established techniques and methods. Curled up in my pocket, I begin to carry a list of reasons why I should stop being anorexic, and sometimes I will pull it out, scan the list, and read each one slowly and quietly—softly—to myself, starting at the first one:

-weight loss is not, and has never been, everything
-vomiting is not healthy and it makes my throat hurt and my voice small, scratchy
-i can put all the time i spent purging and obsessing to good use
-losing weight should not be equated with messing up my body
-food should be enjoyed, and i would like to enjoy it again
-both hunger and dizziness are extremely unpleasant
-UNHEALTHY =/= PRETTY
-if i ever want to have children, i want to be able to
-no one finds anorexics attractive, not even themselves
-i would like to be able to think about other things more often
-anorexia nervosa is making your anxiety and your panic attacks worse
-everyone who knows thinks you should get better—do it for ellen and emily and your parents and paige and christiane and blackie and dr. lake and everyone else you told, if not for yourself
-if you do not break it now, you could end up in the hospital, or worse—in the ground
-there should be more to life than this

Beneath that is a section entitled "REMEMBER," which I read after I have eaten, when I am sick with shame. It is significantly shorter, but in some ways, more powerful.

REMEMBER:
-how good food tastes
-what it's like not to be dizzy, sick
-how nice it will be to see more color in your skin
-that your body can hurt you if you do not listen to it when it is hungry and tired
-anorexia is consuming, mean, and unnecessary

Sometimes I can close my eyes and picture things that are motivating: Christiane and the awkward pause before she says the word anorexia and Paige and her "oh crap, oh Christ, oh damn" when I told her; Emily promising me that she will eventually get me to eat something, and how I ran off into the bathroom and came back only long enough to see Ellen and Emily, their faces shaded with embarrassment and guilt, and the little gray note that I still have that was laid smoothly in the cover of my notebook; my English teacher, his arms crossed and pensive, his eyes big and blue when he asks me, "What's so bad about digestion?" and I look down at my hands that are closed doors no one can open, and know that I could never quite explain enough; and my non-biologically-related Uncle Dale, who sits on my bed with his fingers clasped and says, "You know, if you ever need to talk to someone about something—something serious—go to your Aunt. Uh, not me, because I'm, well, an idiot, but—you know, talk to someone," and me nodding and promising that I will.

I go too quickly up to two thousand calories, and it shocks my stomach and I purge, multiple times. My therapist helps me go slowly after that, teaching me to give myself more and more calories every day, until one thousand—what used to be a forbidden number—is beginning to feel more normal. I discover that eating healthy amounts is like falling back on an old habit, one that is buried beneath worries and matter but is still there, lurking, waiting a year for a chance to reveal itself again, properly and in the right light.

Not very far into my recovery, I begin to gain weight—lots of weight. At one point after dinner, I go upstairs into my bathroom to weigh myself, and I discover that I have shot up almost seven pounds. My head begins to spin and I lean back on the cut white counter and, without thinking, I turn around and press my forehead into the mirror and begin to wash my hands, hard and rhythmic. I scrub down until I am picking at the skin around my knuckles with soap, and my palms are turning slowly red and the swarm of purple like a lake below my thumb gets colored over with bubbly white liquid. I bite my tongue and begin to shake.

But I don't purge. I don't. In the mirror, I slowly look up, and my face reveals itself to me. I bite my lip and run a cold, soapy hand over my lips. I hold it there and whisper absolutely nothing to myself, thinking that if I keep it quiet and under a lid of hand, God won't be able to hear me. After a while I discover I am saying I'm sorry to my body—for the anorexia or for gaining weight, I'm still not sure, just sorry—and I whip around and turn off the lights and leave.

The next morning, I weigh myself and I am down another four pounds—which, although is still three pounds, seems less substantial, less terrifying.

Yes, I think, three pounds. Three pounds of food I once promised myself I wouldn't eat. Three pounds of what you didn't force back up. Three pounds of what you have resisted all these months. Three pounds of shame and misery and skin and fat and flesh, flesh, flesh flesh flesh, your flesh on your stomach and hips and thighs and shoulders and arms and connecting lines and blood and cells and atoms and brain matter and porous, spongy, tissued and flaking flesh.

And I think, I can handle that.


      x.
Do not let them tell you that anorexia is about losing weight.

It's a disguise, a veil, a cheap imitation of our real motivation. The real reason lurks around our hearts and constricts it, quickly, and we close our eyes, because we can't see it and we pretend we cannot feel it beneath our chest, thumping painfully.

Anorexia is not about getting skinny. We may believe this is so, but it's not, it's not. Anorexia is about destroying ourselves.

It is. We want to be threateningly skinny, imposingly skinny, like thin metal rods and narrow poles. We want to look skinny even with our arms pressed up against our sides, and we want to have hard-cut jawbones, sharp elbows, outlined feet. We want to discover the sizes below zero. We want to see so much of our ribcages that it's disgusting, filthy; embarrassing. We want to be so destroyed that we look like we come from the eastern reaches of Africa, like refugees and victims, like a desert where a nuclear bomb has been dropped.

We want to look in the mirror and see all angles, turns and tucks, because there is a terrible, terrible beauty and forgiveness in being a walking, breathing thin wreck. We want the sickness of it never being enough, of warped caloric intakes and the messy landscapes of our thighs, stomachs and chests.

We want so much ruin, it's scary. But it's our ruin. It's our messy body, it's our paper skin and it's our dead eyes. It's the defeat we brought upon ourselves; it's the weight we sent flying away; it's the results we get to dismiss. It's the destruction we get to control.

There's strength in that, you know. In the destruction and the terror. It lurks in the corners, and when we push our plates away, we can feel it, blooming like a sick white flower in our stomachs. There's a strength in being the one to make it happen, and being the one to watch it end. There is a strength in having a direct hand in the destruction of yourself.

No, no. Do not let them tell you anorexia is about losing weight.

Anorexia is, and will always be, about control.


      y.
I toy with the idea that I can go downstairs and eat anything.

Anything I want to. That I could drink all the chocolate milk and Mug Root Beer I want. That I could raid the vegetable and fruit drawers and eat all the heads of lettuce, all the apples, all the onions I could take. That I could open up the snack drawers and take in all those chips and cookies, candies and nuts, all the beef jerky that I want. I could even make coffee and swallow all of it up, black or loaded with sugar and creamer. I could wrench open the freezer and cook all the frozen pizzas, swallow down all the ice cream, and warm all the frozen corndogs that I liked. I could load everything with ranch, sour cream and cheese, if that was what I wanted.

Would my parents make a move to stop me? Would they rush in and rub their hands over mine and say Hey, hey, stop, LeeAnn, look at what you're doing to yourself? Would they save me from my grabby, hungry hungry hippo hands? Would they hold their heads over mine and say You're never going to be beautiful this way, LeeAnn?

I don't, but the idea that I can is enough. Eating was never really the problem, I discover; shame was. It was after I ate and I sat and all I could think about was how stupid I was for eating, for swallowing; about how I used to be a mere twenty pounds from my true goal, my 120, my one-hundred and twenty pounds—that if I just kept it up for another year, I would make it. Ashamed of the fact that I gave in and allowed myself to swallow after chewing, that I let my digestive system kick in and make that food another part of my body, another slab of fat, another ridge of guilt layered on my stomach.

That was the problem—the motivation, the inspiration, the resolution. It started it and it ended it and sometimes I close my eyes and marvel at how it didn't end me.

I compile a list of my favorite foods—on there being pizza, ice cream, toast (with peanut butter) and Poptarts—and promise myself that I will begin to eat more of them. I show my therapist my list and it makes her smile, big and proud, and I know it is better than any pride I could find within myself after purging or restricting. I slowly teach myself to stop gnawing on my fingers, my knuckles, and my wrists, attempting to end my self-injury problem along with my eating disorder.

I practice saying it, in the mirror, as if I am preparing for a speech that is only four words long: I have anorexia nervosa. I have anorexia nervosa. I have anorexia nervosa. I have anorexia nervosa.

I. Have. Anorexia. Nervosa.

And I'm still alive.


      z.
There is something you should know about me—

Before you get tangled up in my accidents and slip-ups, my jackass tendencies and my silent responses, my dramatic screams and stage whispers, my angry heart and my skin that has lost something tragic, my veins like big blue rivers and my arms like long white sheets; all of the things I will stop and tell you and all of the things you will never know, my small aversion to touching and my need for a big hug, my restless and long sleeps and my frequent ritualistic showers, my poor speech and my small little heart that refuses to die; before you are dismissed by the listless league of skin that pours over my body and my tired shriveled insides and the lungs that surely must reside there, a shaky stomach and a throat that must hate me, entirely;

Something that little of my family knows and most of my friends do, something my teachers could vaguely read on my face and something my parents never wanted to see, something I have repeated so many times in my head that the words have turned wrinkled and green with age, and something that I have never quite been able to say, properly, aloud;

Something that is a disease and a habit and a preoccupation and a distraction and a worry and a cloud and a toy and a problem and a solution and a saving, saving grace—something that is a big fat tree that is slowly losing itself, arm by arm by arm, until all the rings on its trunk look like weathered hip lines and its branches are stunted like slivery brown tongues and when it looks down it can see the ground and all the animals that are afraid to climb into its tall depths;

For about ten months so far, spanning over the ages of thirteen and fourteen, from mid-2007 to -2008, throughout my freshman year of high school, I lost about forty-five pounds; I dropped my BMI from around 26 to 19.5; I ate about an average of 200 calories a day, sometimes more and sometimes less, out of the recommended 2500; I purged, vomiting about once a day, five days a week, until my throat was a diseased and shabby cave; I lost my pigmentation, thinned my hair, sunk my eyes, shrunk my stomach, muddled my throat, dried my skin, wounded my brain, bruised my flesh, wrecked my teeth and proved my bones; I was diagnosed about eight months after I began, in correlation with self-injuring, panic attacks, clinical depression, a personality disorder, and a long list of anxiety disorders and phobias; I wrote my way through every lonely night, I stopped looking in the mirror, I liquid-fasted like I would find God at the bottoms of bottles of water and caffeine-free root beer cans; and I have told two therapists (one who wouldn't listen), six friends (one that was accidental), two parents (one who blames herself), two grandparents (one who doesn't understand), and one teacher (who understands completely)—

I have anorexia nervosa.

But don't worry. Don't worry about 5-18% death rates and don't worry about self-esteem and don't worry about intake and don't worry about hospitalization and don't worry about relapse and don't—don't worry about me. Don't.

Because I am getting better.