Dear Ana

01. the beginning

Dear Ana,

i remember when it all started
i was just ten years old
the first time i heard your voice
before you,
i liked my life
i gobbled up strawberry ice cream
on the porch
underneath the blistering sun
i spent the days with my family
or friends
carefree and innocent

however, everyone always liked my sister more
she was fun and pretty and skinny
somehow her metabolism was quicker
and she always ate less

you started telling me i wasn't good enough
that everyone liked her more
that i was ugly and disgusting and fat
that i was nothing.

i believed you.

i didn't even know what i was doing was wrong
i simply listened to you.
i started weighing myself excessively
the space between my thighs widening
the inches shaving off my waist
my collarbone and ribs
protruding and visible

every lunch in fourth grade,
i chucked my cheese sandwich
in the trash
my dinner consisted of a couple bites
of a granola bar

i didn't care about the hunger
the kind of hunger that makes you
feel like someone is punching you in the stomach

i didn't care that my skin was blue
that my fingers were a permanent hue of purple
that i was constantly freezing
and had to wear three shirts even though
it was spring.

i didn't care that i looked like a corpse.

because all i saw when i looked in the mirror,
was a fat, worthless failure.
that wasn't good at anything.
that wasn't good for anything.

you lied to me,
telling me that being skinny
that being able to count every single rib
would finally allow me to love myself,
would finally make me good enough.

my teeth started to deteriorate,
as my once- carefree life
was consumed only by the thought of
calories and how much food i ate,
consumed by reaching this ideal of perfection,
because i equated perfection
with having the perfect grades,
perfect body,
perfect personality.

you lied that everything would be better,
that i would be in control.

but everything was worse.

at first,
the starvation,
the constant weighing
the calorie- counting
the exercising at 5 am
was just to be thinner than my sister,
was just so i could be perfect,
not some shy, weird loser.

but then, the longer it went on,
it wasn't a diet,
it wasn't a choice.
i did it to shut you up.

because you were never quiet,
constantly blabbering in my head,
some kind of monster trapped
in the confines of my skull.

you're disgusting.
you're fat.
look at your thighs- you're a whale.
you're fucking nasty.
you are nothing, nothing, nothing.
you're a failure.
everyone hates you.

all i wanted was for you to stop talking.
to go back to how it used to be,
when i could pleasantly eat
an ice cream cone
without you,
without knowing the exact number of calories,
without you screaming at me about
how i was failing.