[warning - potentially triggering material]
The decent is very quick.
It bubbles beneath the surface for an age, and then one subtle detail slips in, and your whole world is transformed. It very quickly slides from 1200, to 800, to 600, and then to the point where 200 signifies an anxiety attack, and anything that is not single digits, can not be consumed. It's like slippery slope, the further you slide down, the tougher it is to go back up, it becomes a physical impossibility to go back.
Christmas is coming and my therapist as a lovely gift has already singed the papers to send me to the adult services when I turn 18. Which is in five months. Still I'm finding this quite therapeutic, to spill my guts out. They do say that personal experience makes for easy writing.
Reviews are to be adored. And if anyone has any questions or opinions on the subject matter, don't hesitate to message me.
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The content is mine, but the characters are the property of others.
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CHAPTER 2
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The world around her shivers and sighs, a gale of absent minds and thoughtless utterances.
At first it's so very hard.
It's been two days since her discovery on the scales, and that step onto it's shiny surface feels like the first step on an ill trodden path. She senses a shift, but not so much into a new plain of being, but a click, as though a cog has slid into place, a key fitted smoothly into a lock.
She doesn't know quite what to do with herself. Her new resolve has no commandments, she feels as though she's in a limbo, not sure where to place her falling feet. Because she's running, running ever so fast, but her steps are stumbling and she needs to alter and refine her pace.
So she constructs her conquest. Conquest over her failings, over her faults and feeble features. She will achieve her just punishment. All the times she has been told she's wrong, incorrect, incomplete, she summons up, like a witch, draws them up from the depths of her mind, to stir them together to make a stew for self-improvement.
She needs to be tactical if this is going to work. A goal and a plan. Because she mustn't let on, no one can know her newfound punishment. It'll be a game, just by herself, alone against the rest of the world.
She is lost, and not yet found, and this, this is a quest, a quest towards completion, a quest towards a hazy goal, of which she is not quite sure.
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the dreams keep on coming back.
a clock ticking.
This time now spectral cutlery appear, floating on trays of starched linen. They lie there, waiting to be dined upon, for her eyes to fest upon their cool, hard bodies. No sides have they, just pure, grooveless bodies, that slip and slide within her hands.
She has no idea what they are intended for, and she can't help but wonder.
The press of two fleshes; a knife and her own; the pale plain of her upper arm outstretched as though before her. The arm is dripping. White liquid dribbles down the sides of her arm, to slip away, off and under her skin.
She imagines her arm is like cream, a light consistency, made of no more than whipped air.
The knife is slicing through her arm now, of it's own accord, yet her hand is still rapped around it's hilt, as it dissects her naked muscles. More milk bleeds from her arm, but the knife drives deeper, her skin giving way, as though it were slicing through water.
The knife is through, past entering her skin; it flutters away, weightless, borne on silent spectral seas.
Her arm is hollow as it hangs in the air before her, dismembered, no longer her own.
Like the rushing sound of beads, a cascading roar fills her ears, as the arm swells in size. Bigger and bigger it grows, until from the mouth of the open stump, burst forward a flow of hard, black specks.
Maggots tumble to the impossible ground, writhing as they go.
She's full of maggots. They eat her out from the inside, feasting on her organs, digesting her flesh, to hollow her out and burst forward, into the light.
A plate full of worms.
Worms meat she wishes she could be.
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The failure at first still stings. To sit there in class, and hear the lines, her lines, reverberate around the round, is akin to madness. Like a new tattoo, etched across her back, the failure it is a constant presence. But still a creature amongst a crowd. This is not her first heartbreak, and neither will it be her last. School is unbearable. The eyes glint, like roving storm clouds as she passes them by in the gaping halls. It's hard to keep balanced. Her breath is sharp and ragged, as though a knife, serrated and clean, just like the ones she observes in her dream has been plunged into her neck, inserted across to block her windpipe.
Tori swans around on stage her voice barking and her hands gesticulating wildly. False tears burst from crocodile eyes as she laments, this rail of a girl, a pale sheet of a figure, and wails and promises 'I'll eat, I'll eat.'
The knife seems to have jammed itself between the vertebrae of her neck, for now even food cannot pass by its hard surface. She doesn't have the heart to eat breakfast anymore. It's easily avoided too. A quick, 'I'm late' excuses her from suspicion. Though suspicion from what? She knows plenty of girls who skip lunch. It just isn't a necessity anymore it seems. Jade, Jade doesn't eat breakfast. Jade doesn't eat much of anything anymore anyway, but still, if she can forgo it, why can't Cat?
It seems she is now blessed with time. Without breakfast, she can inject new parameters into her morning. Without the presence of food, she leaves the house early, to make the three and a half mile journey to school, which if cantered along at a fast tred, she can cross in almost half an hour. A cool burn plays around her calves and she feels comfort, comfort in the discomfort she is inflicting. The feel of a tight hand around her legs, from where they are weary, squeezing her muscles as they wine for rest. Not yet, not yet. She is on a quest is she not? A wizard or perhaps a knight of some sort, intent on reaching their goal, fighting through hardship, never allowing themselves to be blinded by distraction.
Though a distraction this has become. The cool crow of her stomach calls all morning long, and she revels in the dissatisfaction her body moans when no release is provided. As the day pass, the hunger subsided. 9 o'clock, 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock; the time at which her stomach begins it's gurgling serenade recedes each day, her body becoming more and more accustomed to her daily fasting being broken much later. She is getting better; her body is evolving. At last a change is brewing, beneath the surface, beneath her surface, to burst forth from her eyes and mouth and consume her, chew her up and spit her out until she is nothing but a chewed up pulp of raw flesh and feathers.
She believes her self to be a caveman now.
She eats only protein and vegetables
She is raw inside and out
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800 calories now. That's all she'll have. Food, if it has to, must be consumed between the hours of 1 and 7.
6 hours; a rule, a confinement. More testaments flutter behind her eyelids. Like a thick sludge, the cogs of her brain have been glued together with a tar like treacle. It's been two weeks now, two weeks of convincing herself that 'this food' and 'that food' will in fact kill her. That's what drives away the cravings; the fickle ghosts of taste that prickle the buds of her slack tongue.
'That, that bread will kill you. Be sure of that. It'll slip down your throat, a bolus of half digested food, slippery with your spit, thought not slippery enough. It'll lodge in your throat and stick, stick so that you cannot breath, so that you go red in the face, then purple, then blue, as the oxygen is cut from your brain and you die, listening to the crackle of blood vessels bursting behind your eyes.'
She's not sure where the voice has surfaced from. She is quite sure though that it does not belong to another, but she can feel it on her fingers, and across her back, the shiver of a presence, as unseen hands trace their digits across her enlarged skin.
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She's left the table; she's alone in her room.
The lights are all out reserve for the crack of a pale glow that slips through the crease of her door. It's eight at night but already the exhaustion has sent in. Around her she's built up sheets and pillows, but slumbers on neither, they covet her, cover her, but she cannot converge with them.
The mattress sinks under her father's weight as he settles himself at the end of her bed. It's enough of an indent to permeate her sleep, and with hazy eyes and a groggy mouth, she rises out of the corona of cotton.
'You okay? You missed dinner tonight?'
'Yeah - yeah.' The word feels funny in her mouth so she attempts it again, this time with greater conviction.
'I had a chat with Alex, that you missed.'
'Uh huh? What about?' should she be worried?
'I'm inviting someone round tomorrow night, I think you'd like to meet them,' the ambiguity is making her head spin.
'Who?'
'I met a girl.'
'Girl?'
'Oh no - she's twenty nine, no -' he snorts in embarrassment 'She's a really cool gi- woman - happy?'
She giggles as she watches him struggle at finding a word to pinpoint such a woman.
'She's just really, really cool, and I like her, a lot -' he's babbling furiously.
'And you wanted to invite her round?'
'If that's okay with you?'
'Did Alex say it was?'
'Yeah, yeah. I think you'd really like her. I want you to like her.'
'You're serious, aren't you? About her.'
Her dad rub the back of his neck and grimaces as though in apology 'yeah'
'Don't be sorry. I'm glad.'
'But are you really?'
'I think I am dad. I really do think I am. Things are slotting into place. I'm on the cusp of happiness. I can feel it in my toes.' She wriggles them for good measure and kisses him on the forehead. Perhaps she should feel bad for lying, but truly, she's not. Because the lie doesn't feel as though it is a lie, not really. Perhaps she is on the cusp of happiness, or perhaps rather she's just lost all her emotions. As though dragged out in bloody strings, her feelings have deserted her. She's numb, emotionless. A block of ice that's slowly melting under the scorching sun.
'So is that a yes?'
'Yeah, I think so.'
He gets up to leave; her bed springing back under the release of his weight. He means to go but pauses at the doorframe.
'So next Friday, we can have dinner together, is that okay?'
'Yeah.'
It's like a punch to the stomach. A sudden weight drops upon her shoulders. Dinner. Next Friday. She hasn't eaten dinner in weeks.
She's left alone, cool beads of sweat gleam as they trace paths down her neck as raggedy breaths heave the carriage of her chest back and forth.
She can't.
She just, can't.
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600.
600, a week later seems much better. It becomes easier to just not eat. Before, before it was a struggle, but now, it's perversely hard to push herself above five hundred. So many foods can be simply tossed away, removed from her previously acquired tastes. The sickly sense of starvation is all she desires, the knowing that she is undoing herself, like a zip pulled down from her forehead, over the crest of her nose, past the curve of her neck to grace a path between her receding breasts leading into the hollow of her concave stomach to nestle it's way between her legs. And from this orifice, this unholy mess of her unzipped bodies will leak the resentment and the self loathing, the guilt and remorse and the lies and battering her body has received over the years, and out from her exposed innards will flow a flood of tendons and bile and piss and misery. She'll empty her organs out onto the ground, and from this hollow shell, out she'll step, like a reptile, renewed, birthed again into the empty dusk.
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Her bathroom is mirrored. Painfully so. Four walls of silver.
She spends hours after school looking at herself, naked, shivering the door locked and the windows shut.
The Californian heat doesn't reach her here and the cold seeps up through the white, teeth shaped tiles, up into her swollen toes, into her legs and stomach and arms and brain. A trace of goose bumps consumes her and the blood rushes to her feet leaving them blotchy and purple.
She stands observing, enraptured by her need to change. She examines every fold, twisting to reveal her hidden curves, making sure that nothing, nothing, overlaps.
This will all soon disappear. She'll scrape it all away, her starvation like sandpaper, to roughen away all her hollows and grooves. She'll whittle herself down, until her skin begins to peel, and like sellotape she'll drawn it away to reveal the rot beneath her.
She's festering inside. Under her skin. Her cool blue skin.
Her hands rakes through her thinning hair. I don't deserve it, not any of it. Not these thoughts not these feelings. I don't deserve a stomach or hair or eyes or teeth or a brain.
The punishment must continue, it must never end. Ever.
To be or not to be?
Cat just didn't know
She didn't know if she wanted to be either.
But probably nothing, because that sounded thinner.
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She's alone in her room, swaddled in nothing but the flabby seat of her panties and her ill fitting bra. She stays quite still, too exhausted to move, too exhausted to get dressed. Everything has become an effort, but that just feeds the guilt even more. 6 miles a day, 6 miles that she walks at breakneck speed. It's the little things too; restlessly tapping her feet, sitting with her back ramrod straight, drinking pints of ice cold water because of the way it makes her stomach spasm and her arm shiver with her reptilian blood. But she can't do any of those now, she's completely flat.
Tiny star stickers glitter and glimmer from the ceiling above in the low sunlight. They were the product of summers spent with Jade, winters too, whole seasons consumed with her presence.
They'd giggled and whispered and planned to set their parents up together.
They were both products of incomplete halves.
She's fallen out of touch with Jade over the past few weeks. She'd fallen out of touch with everyone. This righteous quest was all encompassing and her brain had been far to saturated with the avoidance of digestion to even allow thoughts of friends to enter in.
She missed her, missed her snarky comments, the furious glint in her eyes and the constant conviction in her voice.
They'd spent an age in this bed, heads bent together, hair entwined as they plotted their lives, the twists and turns they hoped to expect, the questions life had not yet thrown at them, but questions Jade's curiosity was keen to explore. Explore with her, hand in hand.
She needed Jade more than ever. She was scared. So so scared. Scared of her brain and the thoughts it conjured up, scared of the food, the food the swirled around her and refused to let her go.
'We'll escape our mundane lives.' Jade had whispered 'Together.'
She needed Jade more than ever.
But she was too exhausted to find her.
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The days start to slip away. They merge together into one, like a strip of film, the stills standing alone, but always preceded and followed by something else. Her days are constructed around meals. How easy it is how her brain shifted. Like flood gates, the barriers of her mind have broken down.
She is becoming remarkably good at math now. The lack of food sharpens her mind. She can see the numbers before her. Perpetually floating in front of her face. She must be in check. Always; she must always know exactly where she is upon the planet.
Breakfast - duly missed
Lunch - Quorn burger; 98, ketchup, 15, water, 0 = 113
Dinner - Dry cereal - 84
Total - 197
She wishes to weep.
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On July 13th Jade hands her the flier. Cat remembers the hot breath of the summer and how the sun licked at her exposed back as she sat on the rough tarmac. Her house gave no solace to the sun, and the four walls rather acted as a prison for the heat, so she had fled to the blue eyed gaze of that hot face and was currently praying for a ripple of wind.
She looks up at Jade through her large-hearted shaped sunglasses from her position on the floor, a pair of which were far to large for her face now, which keep on slipping down, grazing her juttng cheekbones.
'What's this?' The question is already posed before she's even consulted the leaflet.
'Some play at the Round. D'ya want to come?' Jade breathes out from a drag of her cigarette.
Cat can't understand how she can inhale the smoke. Not in the heat. Dry smoke and hot air didn't mix, and the smell make Cat feel sick. Good.
Jade noted Cat's expression and crushes the stub under her heel, grinding it into a fine, pale grey dust.
'Blasted' Cat spells out, reading the blood red Helvetica jumping up from the page. 'What's it about?'
'Dunno, it says its Sarah Kane, you know, Psychosis?' Cat nods at the name, not quite getting the connection, but still knowing there was relevance.
'Yeah well, it should be good I guess.'
'Kk, I'll come. What about Beck?'
'He can't, said he'd promised André something, but he'll picked us up after.'
'Sounds good,' Cat chirrups, handing Jade back the leaflet, as the girl drops to the ground and places her self next to Cat on the hot, hot road.
Jade lights up another sickly cigarette and the two spend the rest of the afternoon inhaling gritty fumes.
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No - no, 400 is much better now.
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Cat has an irrational fear of theatres.
They're loud, brash and visceral. And the night had done nothing to relent the heat, so the small sports hall they were crowed into radiated heat and sweat from its four black walls and single door,
The two girls cut their way through the milling crowd, Jade a rum and diet coke filled plastic cup already in hand as she guides Cat towards their seats.
Row K presents a humble view of the eclectic stage and Cat is slightly relived at their distance.
A small light signals thrice and a unanimous hush falls upon the audience as the darkness descends upon them.
Dark figures shrouded by the absence of light begin to move. Cat can't see their complete figures but rather feels the bubbling presence of something out there, large, heaving and chilled.
A light, red and ugly rises high up in the rafters, the glow filtering down into the dusty room, flecks of nothing dancing, caught in it's headlight.
The figures are revealed, naked legs squirming beneath too tight dress, the clothing of a child stitched onto an adult, their age bursting from the seems. They begin they're dreadful dance. And her heart stops.
The dim lights rises, a circle of tables, all draped in the red and white check of a Parisian restaurant, though all connection of fine cuisine it thrown from the window with the presence of umpteen bowls and plates, ladles and dishes. All filled with a brown dank liquid.
Food.
Lot of food; all spread around, spaghetti hoops dripping from the sides, slabs of glistening meat lie on beds of dripping noodles.
The figures churn it up, using hands and teeth, the rooms feast is desecrated, demolished and dismembered. The carcasses of chickens are brought on, livers hanging off spits, thrust into the room and now as the figures turn their awful dance forwards, thrust onto the audience. They rise up into the isles, to consort with their spectators.
Cat cannot move, she is frozen stiff, paralyzed with fear. They must be able to smell it, these hellish creatures, as their eyes turn and they seek her out. A victim of her own fear, she sits there petrified as they saunter towards her. Juices are dripped on her head, meat pushed into her face. She isn't the only one. From the corner of her roving eye, she can see others, dotted around the isles, poor souls subjected to this gory violence.
Churned up food falls into her laps, from the hanging jowls of the spectres, as they leave her with gifts of muscle and starch, to move away to their next victims.
A bowl is now rolled on stage upon a plinth. Its curved hull is rusty with a reddish paint, as two slender hands grasp it's sides. A young woman, draped in white sheets, draws it up to her lips. Like a lamb she is the chosen sacrifice, as she begins to drink from the bowl, it's contents, slipping out from the corners of her mouth, is finally revealed. A dark crimson broth, swimming with chunks of something indefinable is drained from the bowl, into the woman's now swollen stomach.
The ceremony is complete.
The liquid renters the world once more, spilled out across the theatre floor, as the lost lamb, at last, regurgitates it up.
An unwanted child, born from religion, swaddled in a cloak of visceral milk.
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It consumes her now. The madness. She can't scrub it from her eyes, for every time she blinks, she is back there, in that theatre being subjected over and over again. The smell has saturated her skin and no matter how may times she bathes, it will not leave her. She sleeps little and eats even less, a few bows of pasta dutifully swollen to keep her from descending into darkness. For then she would be fully immersed in that horrible fantasy.
The food, the food must be eradicated from her body.
She doesn't mean to do it, but she finds her cheek pressed against the cold seat of the toilet, and a bowl full of sick a few inches below her.
She's sick once, but cannot stop. Her mind drives her stomach into spasms, throwing up the little food she is able to consume between the sounds of her sustenance splattering across the bathroom floor.
She lost from school again. Two weeks this time. Too sick, too consumed in her madness to leave the bathroom.
Her father believes the food poisoning is back, but he couldn't be more wrong. He's told to keep her hydrated and to feed her cold cucumber soup. And so he does, or tries too. The tiles soon become her bed, he dutifully brings her water and rubs her back as she dry heaves into the toilet; all remnants of food, long gone.
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'Cat?'
Jade stands in the doorway, tapping at the peeling paint that marks the boundaries of her room. Like some spectre, she hangs there, waiting for an invitation to enter. She hasn't seen Jade since the play and so she beckons her towards the bed, in wait for the questions about her absence.
But they never come.
Something's changed in Jade's face. Something subtly dramatic. Her eyes seem wider, no - not in surprise, but their proportions, their fit within her face has shifted. Jade's fingers slide between Cat's own in greeting.
'Your hands are cold.' Jade remarks.
'Yours are too.'
It's remarkable how hidden that small, subtle conviction it, carefully laced into her words, but Cat picks up on them instantly; the intonation, the delivery, the meaning.
'How long Cat?' Jade's normal resolve seems misplaced, her words quivering under their weight.
She feels ashamed to answer, to be caught, confronted by Jade of all people. But she relents, let's it spill out.
'Too long I think. The pollution happened long ago, I can't trace it back, but the oil, I'm drenched.'
'Me too,' Jade murmurs as she gathers her dress and pulls herself under the sheet to rest next to Cat.
She is twisted skin, muscle pull, sucked in.
They lie there in the falling dust. Jade's hand, still capturing Cat's, squeezes gently.
'You've been avoiding me.'
'There were just, other things, on my mind.'
'Other things.' Jade sighs. Cat surprised she hasn't been given the third degree, surprise by the lack of anger, of shock, of disgust.
Together they settle in the sheets and sink.
'Do you feel threatened?' Jade asks into the fading light.
'By who?'
'By me?'
'Never.'
Jade pauses, squinting her eyes to gaze up at Cat's embellished ceiling.
'By other people?' She then begins.
'Horrifically so.'
'Same here.' Jade murmurs wistfully.
'They're always there, looking, watching, observing, but never where they're meant to.'
'We'll get there someday Jade, I know we will.'
'Get where?'
'Nirvana,' Cat trances the length of the word with hollow fingers.
'Nirvana?' Jade questions.
'Yeah, that place where all is achieved, where what we strive for is finally captured.'
'Perfection?' Jade remarks.
'Completion.' Cat nods.
'Punishment.'
'Redemption.'
'Two sides of coin' Jade sighs. Cat doesn't like hearing the release of escaped air, it tears at her heart.
After a weighty contemplation, the lull of Jade's voice breaks out in the dusty silence.
'What will we do?'
'Nothing. We'll do nothing.' Cat decides.
'I think that would be for the best.'
Sweet smiles smoother them into slumber. Cat's eyelids flutter, the shapes that construct her room become incomprehensible and she falls into the deep, the last thing to permeate her conscious is the sharp, haggard rise of Jade creamy chest.
Here I am,
Nirvana
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She's fourteen years old and a new, precious temperament has taken over.
They've finally settled in Hollywood, a sprawling mess of manufactured strips of tarmac and artificial vices.
She's tying ribbons to the large tree, that like some organic stalagmite, erupts from the earth of her back yard, a central disturbance that during the summer months tracks the trace of the sky's shadow like a sun dial.
She's surrounded by white picket fences, which for miles stretch on and on, segmented by more painted panels of woods that designate each man's land.
She means to return to the house, to collect a further reel of ribbons, but a hunched figure catches the corner of her eye. A girl, her dark hair visible between the slats of the Cat's back fence, is slumped at the boundary.
Cat, slightly cautious directs her footsteps towards the girl.
'Hello,' She addresses her once she reaches the back fence.
The girl looks round to see who's voice disturbs her peace.
'Are you smoking?' Cat asks once seeing the familiar curl of smoke rise from the girl's nostrils. Like a dragon she snorts.
'Yeah.'
'It'll kill you.'
'That's the point.'
They lapse into silence, but Cat is unfazed, blissfully unaware of the girl animosity towards her. Cat refuses to leave, and so, seats herself as close to the girl as the wooden fence will allow.
'I've seen you before,' The girl tolerates her with a question.
'Really? How- cosmic.'
'Cosmic?' The girl splutters.
'Yeah, comic, stellar -' She struggles for a third mystical adjective.
'Radiant?' The girl asks, catching her glance.
'Exactly.'
Again the silence descends and Cat sits there, watching the rings the girl blows from her puckered lips.
'You used to go to ballet, Didn't you?' Struck by the answer the girl twists round sharply, her cigarette flying from her hand, to settle discarded in the yellowing grass.
Cat can only nod.
'You still a dancer?'
'Not really. Unless you count around the living room,' Cat explains.
'Same here. Prolific bedroom dancer.' She raises her hand as though pledging her life to the exploits of closed-door physical expression.
'Do you want a soda?' The girl holds up her own, previously hidden behind the angle of her lean body
'No, no thankyou.'
'You're not one of those strange kids who drinks only like organic kiwi juice right?'
'No! They just scare me, a little, sodas that is.'
'Pardon?' The girl looks genuinely stunned.
'Because perhaps they fill you up too much, with all them chemically things and then you explode, like a bomb. And die,' She demonstrates with her hands to carry across her point.
'We have diet?' Is her answer, because, well really that's the only other alternative.
'What's diet?'
'It's got like nothing in it, like no chemicals, no calories. My mom drinks it by the pint.'
'And she hasn't exploded yet?'
This makes the girl, for the first time break out into a smile. How pretty it is Cat notes.
'I wish she would!' On noticing Cat's alarm she shifts her voice 'But no - not yet. It's calorie free, so you can drink it till hell freezes over and it won't do jack to you'
'Calories?' Cat inquires.
'Yeah calories.' He girl spells out the syllables on a frosted tongue. 'Ca - lore - ies.'
This girl likes calories, what ever they may be.
Cat likes this girl.
Perhaps she'll just have to chase them both then.
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When she wakes, Jade is gone. The digital clock across the room bleeds out its red numerals, staining Cat's vision with the time. 5:27. She'd been asleep for half a day. She must have slept through dinner, for her stomach quivers with ferocity. She settles back down against the pillow, seeing no reason why she should arise properly just yet. A plan for the day begins to blossom, the excuses she'll tell, the little or no food, she'll consume, 14 raspberries (14) + 6cm of cucumber (6) + a quorn burger (98) + diet coke (1) = 119. That'll be her plan. Perfect.
Her mouth feels empty, and yet so full.
Her mouth feels dirty.
She wishes she could stop thinking.
She wishes she could wash away
A sea foam child regressed
Once again.
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Comments and reviews are truly glorious, and I would be grateful for any suggestions on how I might be able to improve this dirge of a fic.
Of course if anyone has any questions or opinions on the subject matter, again, don't hesitate to message me.