How to Love Claire Mason

Still Learning, Together

Day five. My arms are still ghosts of their former shape, my hip bones still feel like sharp stones wedged into my sides, and my cheeks have not yet returned to their usual soft, fullness. I guess I shouldn't expect much of a physical change after less than a week. But I feel changed, inside. The grip of the disorder has loosened, and it never was as strong as the first time around. Perhaps it only struck me because I was weak and vulnerable, desperate for control and security. Now I'm strong enough to say goodbye forever; to starving, to punishment and hatred, but maybe not to my new friends.
At each meal, Annie, Shae, and I have become more comfortable, and closer. Annie revealed that she really wants kids. Four at least, probably five, all her own. The way she talks about them, as if they're already alive and waiting for her back home, is beautiful to see. When she describes a little girl with glassy blue eyes to match hers, dainty brown curls, and sweet, tiny, baby feet, her whole face becomes illuminated and she smiles wide as if she's forgotten the miserable state of her teeth. Then she laughs that dry, yet somehow contagious laugh of hers. She says she's thinking of getting a sperm donor so she can be a single mother. "I don't know if I can trust a man again. Or at least, trust myself to choose a good one, " she said over oatmeal yesterday, a half-smile, half-grimace spreading across her pale face. I lay awake last night, thinking about her words, secretly hoping that, one day, a kind man would stumble into her life. They wouldn't meet at a bar, because Annie, I hope, would be sober. They'd meet somewhere romantic like a park or even one of those dining in the dark restaurants she mentioned she might try so that she wouldn't be immediately judged for her teeth. Yes, they could meet at one of those. The gentleman would fall in love with Annie's laugh and charming warmth and cleverness over sparkling water and pasta, and once they exited the room out into the street, he wouldn't look twice at her before pulling her close for a kiss in the golden light of a streetlamp. He'd walk her home but wouldn't stay the night, at least, not until a few dates later. Time would pass, their love story would be written over Annie's past like a fresh coat of paint, and one evening, after just enough time had passed, he would pop the big question. They would marry, and have several beautiful children with their mother's looks and their father's good mental health. Annie would have the happily ever after she deserves.
My greatest hope is for her to be able to leave here when she's better and find true happiness and solace in life. I can't stand to think of her becoming trapped in an endless cycle of hospital stays and rehab. Sometimes, I can see a flicker of the spunky, bright-eyed, lively, and innocent girl she must have been, years ago. Before the abuse and anorexia and bulimia stole that girl and replaced her with the pale, disheartened, skeletal ghost girl that I've been eating meals and making charm bracelets with these past few days. When I look at her, I hear my mother's voice sobbing to my eleven year-old self: "Where'd my little girl go? I want her back." She always said that when we would fight over meals. I hated her for saying it, for making me feel as if I was possessed and she needed to exorcise the demons inside me. It was not until I had truly began to recover that first time that I understood. I wanted my old self and my lost, disrupted childhood back too. And now, when I look at Annie and hear those echoing words, I long to see the old Annie, whoever she may have been. I long to tell her not to go away with that horrible man and to stay with her mother as long as she can and to eat cake on her birthday and anytime she wants and to never worry.
I wish I could have had someone do that for me. Someone to catch ten year old me by the arm just before the first seed of self hatred could be planted and tell me the secrets of life and love and being happy. Someone to tell me I never needed to change and that the right boys would never make me feel more or less worthy than I already felt because who loves me would never be a measure of my worth. Someone to renew my membership to innocence and bliss for a good three years so that I would not learn to diet like a middle aged woman and memorize nutrition facts at the age of eleven or worry that no one would ever love me.
I think all little girls and boys, at least, the ones that are most vulnerable, need a quiet yet resounding voice in their heads to tell them these things before they trip and fall and learn the hard way. Yet that's what life is, learning from mistakes, but mistakes like ours are deadly. Mistakes like ours, if we are lucky, result only in shiny white scars on our wrists, nightmares that seem to only be replaying reality, hair loss, broken bones, ugly teeth, and isolation. If we are lucky. If we are unlucky, our mistakes are written in between the lines of suicide notes left just before we cut too deep, they are taunting whispers that whistle through our hollow, empty, bony bodies when our hearts fail, they are the colors of the bruises on our broken lifeless bodies after we stayed because we told ourselves our so called lovers would never hurt us again. And we are always the last ones to see the truth about mistakes, our faults, our illnesses. And when they are the end of us, we can never learn from them.
I think about these things as I sit with Annie, and Shae, who is still pretty quiet most days. I think about how, though, I am younger, I have learned more. Our disorders make us equal, in a way, because of our similar mindsets, habits, thoughts, and feelings, though all of our struggles are different. Though we sit together in a room and eat carefully measured meals meant to save our lives, we are all in different places, I being the furthest along in recovery, if you don't count the fact that I have relapsed. I am the closest to fully learning from my mistakes as it is my second stay, and the feeling that I am ahead makes me feel suddenly so much older. Older than Shae and Annie, which I guess is why I am always silently cheering them on, wishing them the best. I don't think I would be doing so in quite the same way if I had never recovered before.
Yet I don't feel I am in a position to give any words of wisdom to them just yet, as I am, clearly, still learning too. We all are, together, and it feels a hell of a lot better than being alone.