Aria's Story

~ Chapter 6 ~

I still can't believe how far my eating disorder has taken me and what it has taken from me; I wouldn't really say I was proud of it, I'm more ashamed of it. My eating disorder has taken my ability to be able to be honest to my friends and family, some of my friends are leaving me because of it, my parents are away more because they don't want to deal with it, and it's made me feel so much pain that I can honestly say that I hate myself and that I want to just give up on life. But after everything that I've been through, it's all coming back to me now.

I guess in a way you could say that I'm getting worse; I'm losing a lot of weight really fast, I'm constantly cold, I've barely eaten in weeks, it seems like my appearance has been changing everyday, I get out of breathe too fast and I feel dizzy constantly, I'm starting to get bruises around my body, my nails look awful, and my hair looks completely dead and out of color.

All you ever do is get worse. Look what you're doing to yourself.

"I don't care what I'm doing to myself; I just need to be thin." I say to myself as I try to drown out the voice in my head. "All of my life I've been waiting for the moment to shine, and this is my only shot at that. Don't ruin it for me. I need this,"

Hunter isn't always going to love you, you know, and you definitely won't have him when you end up going too far. You may have known him for years but that doesn't mean he won't leave you. I bet he'll leave you when you get hurt and go way too far, ending up being hospitalized for days or maybe weeks.

"Shut up, shut up, shut up." I silently walk around my room, trying to distract myself and focus on something else. "Hunter loves me and he'll never leave me," I try to reassure myself, but I think the voice in my head is right. How long will it take him to leave me?

Yeah, right.

I walk over to the bathroom that is connected to my room and I look at myself through the mirror, and I can instantly spot the fat on my body. I can feel tears slip down my face as I stare at myself, hating my reflection. My arms look too wide and my legs look even wider than before. My stomach still isn't flat enough. My body isn't thin enough.

I feel like people who don't even know me think that I have terribly low self-esteem. I try my hardest to fit in and to lose weight, but it sometimes feels like nothing works and that makes me feel really weak.

Who's really in control of this?

~~

"Hey, Aria," Hunter says to me as he grabs my hand and starts dancing.

The way Hunter looks at me makes me feel really special and it makes me happy to know that he really does care about me, even though I doubt it sometimes. We've been going out for three months now and he's made my whole world feel more real. He's made me so happy that I can barely hide my eating disorder from him. He makes me feel so special and I love him for that.

I dance with him to the song Brave by Sara Bareilles. As we dance, he doesn't take his eyes off of me and he makes sure that I'm having a fun time the whole time we dance. After we finish dancing, we walk over to the bench outside of his house. He pulls me close and lets me lean my body on his while he kisses my cheek. "You're beautiful," He tells me as he looks down at me and gives me a sweet smile.

Even though I strongly disagree with him, I nod. I didn't want to let him in on what I'm thinking inside because then he might know everything that's going on with my eating habits and that's a really scary thought.

He wouldn't want to know anyway. He won't love you if he knew.

I look over at Hunter smile at him. I decide on not telling him what's going on and decide to give him a quick kiss before leaning back on him. Faking a smile always has been easy for me, but it's much harder to fake it towards Hunter because he means so much to me.

He'll never find out. What he doesn't know won't kill him, right?

~~

The truth is, when it gets really quiet, when the silence gets too loud, I really start to miss everyone. At four in the morning, I can't sleep and the voices inside me constantly make me feel like giving up and making me feel so miserably about myself. I wish someone would just barge into my room and start talking so that it shuts down all the voices inside.

You know, maybe I deserve all of this; I was born to be basically tortured by this cruel eating disorder and by this demon inside of me, and it's like no matter what I do, it won't go away. I feel lost inside myself and I feel like I don't belong anywhere, not even with Hunter or with any one of my friends. I feel alone and it's suffocating me.

You're absolutely pathetic, you know that?

Make it stop, make it stop, please make it stop. I throw my hands up in defeat and fall back into my bed, closing my eyes and wishing everything that I hate would just go away and never come back. I think of a song that I enjoy listening to and keep repeating it in my head, It helps when I'm trying not to give up on something.