The water runs smoothly down my naked body. Almost as if I were the sweet stitching of a silk sheet, it runs through me.
I feel drips drop down from my face, I can hear them hit the shower floor. In the silence, they sound like loud- thundering rain drops warning me of the hurricane that's about to come.
"I'm breaking up with you," his voice is echoing through my head, shattering inside of my chest.
Everything fades away from there, I only remember the crying and the yelling that followed. I hit my head against the shower wall, angry.
There are too many thoughts scurrying through my head. They are fighting with one another, desperately trying to reach out to me, to be known. So many thoughts get lost, get thrown away into some void. Only later it is known that those absent, meaningless, thoughts were the most important.
I am those thoughts, my entire existence can be defined by them. Are people their own existence? If so, I hope that no one looks at mine- I hope mine gets lost in that void because it was completely and utterly meaningless.
I close my eyes.
"You can't do this to me!" I screech on the top of my lungs, banging my hands against his chest.
His honey brown eyes are filled with pain as he looks at my desperation. "Stop," he says. "Stop," he repeats.
Tears are streaming down my face, and I'm angry, so angry.
"You can't do this Henry!" I yell. "I need you damn it! I need you!" I scream.
He's latching onto my arms that are still beating against him like loose cannons.
And, he stares into my eyes so profoundly that I can't help but break down. I'm sobbing uncontrollably.
"I'm sorry Gwen," I can hear his cracked voice, "I love you but I can't watch you destroy yourself-"
I blur out his voice immediately, banging my head again and again.
Go away. Go away.
"Just go away!" I murmur to myself, pulling on my brown hair. I'm feeling my knees cave in and I'm slipping, suddenly sitting on the shower floor.
The water is still running, it runs down my cheeks- wiping away any shed tears. I reach out and turn a knob to the right, turning off the water.
I carefully stand on my feet, lifting myself up with my arms, my knees shaking. I grab a towel that was hanging nearby on a rack and wrap it around my body.
My body.
"Look at yourself Gwen!" Henry shouts.
"I do!" I retort, keeping my eyes down and away from his.
"No!" He shakes his head, upset. "Look at yourself Gwen, really look. Look Gwen damn it!" He pleads.
One by one, I lift my legs and eventually myself out of the shower. I don't look in the mirror.
Look.
I can't look. I don't want to look.
Maybe if I looked, something about myself would change, maybe somehow I'd stop feeling the way I do.
Slowly, painfully, my own eyes start to betray me. Before I have the chance to stop, to turn away, I begin to examine myself. I look.
The first thing I see are my eyes. They're oddly wide, average brown with dark circles beneath them. Nothing out of the ordinary,except-my cheek bones.They are too noticeable, I have never been a girl with glamorous features, let alone cheek bones. I always wanted cheek bones.
My face is so narrow. And my skin,I stare at my rugged pale skin, at my evident bones sticking through it, the shadows between my skin and the hallowness of my bones. My skin, is a thin sheet over them, hugging them shyly and leaving them exposed to the open. They are uncomfortable to look at, to feel as I walk.
"Please just look at yourself!" His brown eyes are black, filled with tears.
"I'm skin and bones."
I whisper into the nothing.
I know I'm sick, that there's something wrong with my way of thinking. There's something wrong with the way I look at myself, at how I don't cringe at the sight of my ribcage showing.
I'm sick in the head, I know. They all act as if I didn't know there was something wrong with me, as if I were completely unaware of the fact that I'm my own disease. That I'm slowly killing the hope that's left inside of me.
They just don't understand, and they won't understand that this monster living inside of me is stronger than my own will. This monster isn't a whisper into nothing, no, it screams and it shouts. It yells into my ear, into my being and it makes itself known.
The water is drowning my lungs and the ocean is consuming me alive, but I don't struggle- no I don't even fight. I'm too much of a coward to save myself.
The truth is, I'm scared. I'm too scared to stop this madness that's destroying my emotional stability and destroying my physical youth.
The reflection in the mirror is a bitter sight, I look so narrow and so bone skinny. Yet, I still manage to find areas of fat, like that little bump on my right thigh and the fat beneath my arms.
"I don't even recognize you anymore, " Henry would say poking at my cheeks.
"I'm just getting that summer body," I would repeat, even during the winter.
"You're doing drugs?" He asked looking at the bag of pot on my bedroom dresser.
"Just to relax," I would answer unaware that, that bag of pot would lead to slivers of cocaine.
"You need to stop, please" Henry would plead, taking a hold of my hand and kissing it gently. "You're beautiful, the way you are."
I'd blush, and lean my head on his shoulder.
It's absolutely dreadful, absolutely heart wrenching seeing someone give up on you. It's the worse pain I have ever endured, seeing Henry, my Henry fall out of love with me.
But then again, who would love an anorexic crack head?
I look at my reflection once more, no longer comfortable with my evident bones and my oddly pale complexion. My stomach is turning slowly, with disgust at this girl- at what I've become a slave to.
My eyes catch a glimpse of a pair of black scissors and without thought I latch onto them as if it were a life vest.
As if these scissors were the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ, saving me from my own demise.
Without thinking twice, I latch onto the long locks of my brown hair and cut piece after piece off. Strands of hair are filling the bathroom counter, piles of hair. I'm cutting it off. I'm cutting it all off.
With a racing heart and a nervous hand I say to myself, to the world, to the demons eating me alive.
"This ends now."
