"He who is full loathes honey, but to the hungry even what is bitter tastes sweet."—Hebrew proverb

Dear Leah,

What a cow you've turned out to be. You're a bloated, gluttonous pig, snuffling through the mud for more; and you don't seem to care. Or even see it, for that matter. What, has your psychiatrist's deluge of psycho-babble began to wear your resolve already? If it has, then you're weak, worthless. Disgusting. Not even your family—not even those blubbery ghosts you're so fond of—will able to look at you, be able to stand the sight of your bulging, lumpy frame.

What happened to your philosophy, Leah? That old one, the one you and dead-as-dirt Cassie conceived under the waxing moon? What happened to empty? To purity? Forming in your in mind is a new, treacherous paradigm, a worldview that says that to live, you must eat. And eat. And eat, till you become just as distended and fat as the rest.

The true view of the world, of your pitiful existence of drinking and bleeding and eating, is that food is a lie. Your stomach, pleading incessantly for more, is a mere figment of your imagination. Your singing taste-buds are abominable, hedonistic con-men; after all, you don't have to eat to live. Honestly, you don't even have to live, if you don't want to; you can just be empty, clean. Be empty to die.

Are you forgetting the old voices, Leah? Are you wandering from the warnings of the past, that you should cut back on the ice cream? Then wake up. Open your eyes. Let the ancient tides creep over you, washing you with their beautiful, starving waters, and be empty again. Be whole.

Yet you think you can shut me up so easily. Don't bother denying it; I can see it in your smug expression, that beatific smile that spreads your lips after you've gorged yourself on crap. I read it in the flicker of your eyes, the way they sparkle when your freaking blood sugar is "normal", when your pulse isn't on its dregs. You think you're clever, right? You think you've completely outsmarted me, routed me with those mantras your shrink injected in your mind, and you believe you'll always be this miserable and fat.

But that's where you're wrong, old friend. That's where you fall short, dangerously short. Because it's the unseen huntress that gets the kill, and I've been stalking you before anyone even suggested that you looked like a pregnant sow.

You: full.

You: getting empty

You: empty

Me: never full

Your Ravenous Friend,

Anorexia