He claws at his stomach, staring down his bare, chapped flesh in the bathroom mirror. He whispers words of hatred to himself, and avoids his reflected eyes. He feels dizzy; he's going on four days, five in an hour or so. He still feels full, he tells himself.
He wishes he was hollow, skin clinging to bone, a skeleton. He wants to see his ribcage with great detail, wants to trail his fingernails along his defined hipbones, see the dents in his cheeks. He wants to be a piece of artwork, of anatomy, something that should be displayed in a gallery. He wants to be beautiful, but he's not. He wants to be skinny, but he's not.
He blinks heavily, taking in a slow, deep breath. The room is spinning again, and his hands are beginning to shake, but he ignores it. He wonders if he can throw anything up, if there's anything left in his stomach for him to rid himself of. There's still too much skin, too much fat clinging to him. It makes him cringe.
He walks to the toilet, the porcelain, his savior and his demon. Two fingers slip inside his mouth, jamming into his throat, feeling around until they hit something, and he lurches forward. Bile churns in his throat, begging to escape from the cavern of his esophagus. Screaming at him.
He lets himself fall, lets the acidic remnence of last week's breakfast spill from his mouth. He chokes, coughs, but is euphoric once he pulls back. He is calm, and he is that much closer to being complete. He peels a piece of toilet paper off of the desintigrating roll, wiping the corners of his mouth, tossing it into the trashcan beside him.
He should be happier, he should be thinner than this. He looks down at his shirtless body, at his skin and fat covered hips, glaring. He wishes he could burn it away, send it to hell, never see it again. He wants to be nothing more than bones. He wants to be something unbroken, but it seems as thought each time he tries to repair himself, it backfires.
He likes to think that she made him into this, that she made him the way he is. But in all truth, he's the one that does this to himself. He made himself fall in love with her. He made himself break his heart. Where she survived, he exploded. Disappeared.
He's always gone. He's always the one left out, the invisible, the monster. He's never important, or at least in the way that he wants to be. He knows that nothing will make him feel beautiful, and the people around him will only make him feel fatter. But the one thing that can make him feel beautiful, is temporary. Love is temporary. No matter how long you speak it, you can never feel it forever. Everyone becomes bitter.
He coughs, phlegm resting on the tip of his tongue. He stands, attempts to put his feet on the linoleum ground with strained effort, and holds himself up with his hands. He's wobbly and unsure, and takes that as a sign that he needs to lose more, faster than before. He spits into the sink, blinking heavily, and sighs. Blindly, he turns on the faucet, glancing down at the substance spinning in the drain. It's blood red. It's blood.
He begins to worry, minutely, but decides it's from the food. Yes, the food scratched the inside of his mouth on the way up. In the back of his mind, he knows he's wrong, and that something isn't right, but he doesn't want to think about it.
He can't stop. He doesn't want to stop, because he wants there to be an end result that doesn't involve eternal darkness, or whatever happens after you die. He wants to see himself be the streamline, stick-thin heartthrob, the one who the girls will fall for and the boys will envy. He wants her to notice him. He can imagine it. It's within his reach.
This is just backwards self-improvement.