Walls

Chapter 18- Slipping Away

There comes a point when you have an illness where you're numb to it. The idea that your own body or mind is slowly tearing itself apart from the inside out is no longer scary. You no longer fear the idea of death or hospitals. Sometimes, you don't even realize you're still sick. For anorexics, they use their disorder to feel in control of their usually hectic lives. When they cross the point of guilt and trying to hide what they're doing, they enter the stage of comfort. Comfort in starving, comfort in the feeling of their own ribs, comfort I'm seeing how many days they can not eat without passing out. It's no longer a disease to them, no longer a problem. So when someone tries to help them, tries to heal them, they usually try to push them away. Because to them it's not going to damage their health, it'll make them perfect. And sometimes they realize before they've destroyed themselves and every relationship they had, but others, others just slip away into the void of their illness.
I can tell that Ed knows. The past few days he's done nothing, but watch me with some sad , pitiful, look in his eyes. He watches, just waiting to save me, like i'm broken, like I'm ill. He tries to shove food at me, thinking he's being subtle. I'm not sure what to do anymore. I've tried to distract him with sex and it doesn't work. I've tried taking him to show practices to prove to him that I'm still me, but it doesn't quite work when I've passed out on him multiple times. He keeps taking me to the hospital, but this time I got smart and have paid my way out.

I just don't see how he doesn't get it. I'm doing this partially for him. I'm just trying to be perfect, so that he can say he has a hot girlfriend, not a fat ugly one who's covered in lard. No one wants to be with that.

He's been doing the same thing I have anyway. Slimming down to look better in public. Sure he has a healthier way of going about it, but mine is working faster and giving me smaller numbers on the scale.
Ed's POV
I don't know how to help her. I've been trying to get her to eat, but my attempts are countered with 'I ate' or 'i'm not hungry' or 'i'll just eat a salad'. Which might not sound too bad but her idea of a salad is a small handful of spinach with carrots and cucumber and no dressing. She's not herself anymore either. She's defensive and angry, yet tired and limp. The light in her eyes she used to get when she was excited is gone and replaced with hollow oceans. She's tired and can hardly do anything other than preform anymore. She's passed out in my arms 7 times, 3 of which ended in ER visits. She kicks me out of the room every time, not allowing me to hear the diagnosis. All she does anymore is try to distract me from her obvious problems.

She's slipping away from me and I don't know how to save her. I can't call her parents because she hasn't talked to them in years and all it would do is trigger her. I can't call her friends because in the month I was gone she managed to push all of them out of her life. All she has is me and all I really have is her, yet all she wants to do is keep me out when I want nothing more than for her to let me in the way she once did. all I want to do is love her and she won't let me because she doesn't even love herself. I'm not even sure if she knows that she has a problem now. She's killing herself slowly, but surely and I'm just meant to sit her and watch her waste away into a corpse.
She was skinny to begin with and now she's down 60 pounds. She was still 10 below her starting weight post treatment and she's managed to burn 50 more in the month I've been gone? Or maybe it started before and I just refused to see it. That seems to be a pattern with me and her, not catching it early enough to stop the agony of when she tries to gain again.
She was always lanky, she makes me look like a hobbit. But she had enough meat on her and was fit and strong. Most people didn't know it, but she could hold her own. Now her arms are only as big as her bones are, which aren't very big. Her stomach concaves  in such a way that I swear it moves her organs and is touching her spine. You can count everyone of her ribs and I'm pretty sure I almost cut myself on her hipbones yesterday. Her legs are tooth picks and that I'm pretty sure if she lifted something heavy would snap. Already 00 clothing is baggy and her costumes have been altered to the nines. She doesn't get asked to make appearances anymore because she's difficult.
She's destroyed her life in an in fathomable amount of time and I'm clueless as to how I bring her back. Between the voice in her head telling her to keep going on the track she's on and the voices of the media still attacking her even with what she's going through, there's no way to stop it when she sees these things everyday and uses them as fuel to go another day without food.
A/N: everyone was really upset when I said this book only has a few more chapters so I'm trying to stretch it out for you guys a little bit, but there'll only be 2 chapters after this and I can promise you'll need tissues for them :)