Maybe one day...

Roberto's letter

Hi Rob,

we were two ghosts unaware that we had fallen into the same hell.

I watched you disappear as you watched me trudge on

Only

Like you

Drifting

I want to tell you something

Only mine

Only ours

Like you I too wanted to commit suicide

I don't use any other terms I don't want to mince words. A definition that makes one shudder. But for us it was a constant thought, wasn't it?

I thought, making the list, of the people who would really be devastated by my act. And in the end, there were only a few fingers left raised.

Barely a hand would compose itself. Because one variable. It was time

Time, our enemy. It makes us forget things

But unfortunately

People too

And we, we would be forgotten. In vain a distant thought

And then I would say to myself: if perhaps that wasn't the solution

I wondered if my pain could be compared to theirs

A usual question weighed on my mind: Was life worth living?

We were always taught to value everyone as we constantly

evaluated ourselves. Without our numbers we were nobody.

Something that drove us to madness

First that little number in a check, then on the scales.

We never really thought we were worth as people.

We clung to our illness. Deluding ourselves that someone could really see us

We could never cry, we had to be strong, to prove to everyone that we couldn't break. Instead we cracked in half, slowly.

But it was never enough We were never thin enough. It was never enough cuts. Deep enough

Good enough

Deep enough

A terrible word that brought you to the brink. You just wanted to disappear

It sounds like a joke our never perfect life, and the more you grow the more you realise that the perfection

that everyone wanted doesn't exist. Nobody is

But it's late now, that thought is as fixed as a nail in the wall. The hole will remain.

The idea that to be loved you must be perfect, better than others, that to be considered you must always be strong. The idea that you have to make everyone proud, that if you make a mistake they will no longer love you, they will look at you with hatred, with contempt.

But you are only human and no one Roby has ever reminded you of that.

When you turn around and look at your life you think you've lived so many,

you told me one night, remember? So many little stories that seem disconnected

So many sorrows

So many monsters

I don't know, if I'll ever come out of it. Because after all, anorexia promises to fill the gaps in your soul. It pretends to help you hold the pieces of your life together. It seduces you

Deluding you into believing that you are in control

It takes you lightly to the precipice and then...It still manages to have power, to persuade you that if you throw yourself down things will get better. It convinces you that you are no good, that you have to change to be loved, that you have to die to be looked at.

And you believe it. Because you're alone, aren't you Rob?

You were alone or so you thought. Because in truth it is she who makes you lonely. Isolates you from the world

She keeps you apart. She teaches you to lie

She rebukes you

In the end she controls you, makes you believe that you, without her, are worthless.

You are nobody without your illness. The idea that you can get out of it frightens you, because although unhappy, you are no longer alone.

You have her, I thought I was crazy. I screamed that I had monsters in my head.

I wanted to hold your hand, an icy hand

bony, like mine.

Your arms full of pipes. Together with mine full of cuts

We are not crazy Anna

We never were

We are fragile people. Sensitive to the world. Too aware of our surroundings

Too attentive to details. People who see beyond the walls. Because that is what we have always hoped for. To be seen beyond those barriers we have painstakingly constructed for ourselves.

Let's be strong. The warriors

We keep fighting the windmills in our heads. And I know Rob you just wanted to stop fighting and find peace. I don't blame you. Sometimes I think you had more courage than me. Sometimes I blame the world instead.

Why didn't anybody do anything? Why didn't anyone see you? Because in the end that will always remain my fear. But I'll make you a promise. Only to you

Who I know are listening to me. I will not forget you. I will not forget the deed you did. I will not forget your illness and your pain. I also promise to fight for all people like you and me who are sick and smile every day.

I promise to endure and when I give in. I will remember your face

And I will get up fighting for you too. Because I have grown up and

I have learnt to fly To see myself with my own eyes not with others'.

I send you a kiss

A promise

A caress

Bye Roberto.

So she had written, then with a lonely tear she had let it all go up in smoke.

Anna had happy periods, which almost made her forget that she was like this. That she was fighting against monsters.

She had had two years in which the bubble she had built for herself was so perfect that she almost thought she was cured, but it all suddenly cracked when she met Lorenzo.

At first she had not known that he would take her back to exactly a few years earlier, alone on the bathroom floor again.

Yet when he had left her it was as if only then had she realised how many cracks had formed in her crystal ball and everything had suddenly collapsed with a clatter of shattering glass.

She had been shocked at how she had not noticed anything and from one day to the next had reverted to her illness with an unseen violence.

She had found herself fighting her head once again.

At first she did not want to, she fought.

She screamed that this time she would not win.

Then the pain of losing her boyfriend had become unbearable, and so she had welcomed anorexia as an old friend. She had let it take control of her life once more, because she knew that it would make her happy once more.

So she isolated herself again and went back to her old habits.