Eleutheromania

Chapter One: Day One

31st March 2013

I feebly dragged my legs into the unfamiliar room which would soon become a prison cell to me. As the buzz of chatter faltered, I craned my neck around, and then around once more, my sunken sockets catching the pupils of everyone else within the room. This was the room which was destined to control my lifeless shell for quite some time. The first thing my malnourished mind did manage to suck into its smallness was the gap which seemed colossal to my concave and hunched structure. A seemingly vast space between the table I would sit at and the one opposite it. And then the people. The girls on the longer table were all digging in with a content atmosphere surrounding their bubble of chatter, and I flinched when the happy tinge to their cheeks suddenly deformed as they looked at me in horror. They then resided with sympathy and a sense of déjà vu in their eyes, remembering the very day which they too had been in my position.

Then I caught sight of the daunting table, and already I realised I had entered a brewing battlefield. The only thoughts my narrow mind could cope with commenced in loading up the soul destroying kalashnikov with bullets that would only add to each gash. It certainly appeared to be a judicious choice of size, seeing as the tiny collection of little girls seated on the very tip of their chair barely scraped a quarter of their appointed space. They were thin. So deadly, paleley, eye catchingly skinny that the way their emaciated bones protruded into the air made me feel sick. It made the bile bubble in the stomach that hadn't been given its wishes for eighteen days. And with the sickening mixture of jealousy and nerves stirred into this nothingness I was struggling not to choke on the contents of air inside of me.

"You're on table one." The dietician, who I had just moulded a five hundred calorie meal plan with, informed me. Following the instantaneous diagnosis of anorexia nervosa, this table number was next on the list of labels that would dehumanise and define me whilst I was there.

The dietician brushed her hands lightly down my spine in an attempt to comfort me and removed her fingers almost immediately. She seemed nice. Little did I know that her thudding footsteps would soon be like an incoming earthquake along the narrow corridors before they reached me. The sound would send tremors through my brain and body. The drumming would shatter the ground I tip toed on, cracking more and more as I advanced towards the dreaded "calorie increase". But I was naïve to that at that point. With my narrow vision I analysed each pale face to the other and my eyes flew across the row of skeletons before me. What was this supposed to be? A horror show? No. There must have been a mistake. There was no possible way that I could be seated with these petrifying girls. I must have been three times the size of one of those drooping dolls. The contrast would be far too strange. They stared at me with a tortured look in their glass eyes. The verisimilitude of this situation being I was the closest to death by miles of meals failed to occur to my panicked mind. I couldn't run, for I would fall in my first attempt at abrupt movement in weeks. I couldn't hide. My crave-some strive for invisibility just wasn't going to plan. I was now unleashed from the warmth of my bed covers and driven hours away from my home into a strange whereabouts. Gentle hands had examined me on a back-breaking table and a bespectacled man had slowly inked every answer I had given to his quizzical questions. I couldn't even remember what they were. I didn't care either. The energy of holding my cage upright was drowning me into dizziness, but I followed the blurred beckoning of fingers a few footsteps from me and sunk into the only empty seat. That was it. Id doomed myself. Id placed myself in the locale which would give me nightmares from that very evening.

Because sitting on it meant participating in the unthinkable. Something which I'd blocked for so long that I felt I might never of had to encounter it again. At that point I didn't even know they were going to make me eat. I thought I'd come here to die, to live out the last of myself. My fate was sealed the moment my aching bottom collided with that leather chair. From that second onwards I would fidget in that seat six times a day every single day and spoon hatred into my body. I would face the evolved fear that I used to love. And not only that but I would have to let each monstrosity, each unit of energy, swarm into my body and sew my skin thicker, swamping my brain as they spread their liveliness from bone to bone. It would be more than torture. It hadn't just reached the point where I didn't want to eat. I literally couldn't. The fear of gaining weight and losing control combined was strong enough to send me into panic attacks from the sight or smell of food alone. It was like a poison. It was as if everything edible had become tinged with all of anorexias trepidations by the flicker of my eyelids alone. It had altered every single aspect of my life to the point where I now had to be forced into this stupid chair and be observed like a baby until I was deemed 'stable' enough to continue on my own. I had absolutely no idea of the hell I was soon going to physically- but not very physically as I would realise quickly they were all about minimum movement- and mentally endure.