She ran to drown out all the sorrows. The slap of her feet hitting the ground, the wind rushing past her in dim roar, her hair streaming behind her because as usual she forgot to put it up, it was all so comforting to her. Her legs were burning ever so slightly, a dim feeling that barely registered in her mind. Her breathing started out in an irregular beat, but soon fell into the rhythm of the heat, a rhythm as familiar as the bile forcing it’s way up her throat. She swallowed, the tingly sensation of being burned by acid leaving it’s mark. Her hands were still tense, but after a few minutes they relaxed, the same way all her grief managed to disappear. If only she could do the same…
“120,” She said proudly, after glancing at the scale. It was almost borderline-scary how obsessed she was getting with the numbers. All day, everyday. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ,6...64,” A comforting beat, always at the same tempo. A steady stride, a confident attitude, all that was required when she was lost in her world of music and motion. The world could blur away into nothingness when she really tried, when the rhythm carried her heart and soul away. And then the numbers on a scale, slowly going down in the same tempo, the same uneasing speed, were further proof of the power of numbers. She was proud of the numbers. The way they kept her world in line, if only for a moments, the way they confirmed that she really was small, tiny, adorable. Perfect...
She knew the symptoms, but not the cause. She knew her world was going down in a steady spiral, at the same rate as the numbers on the scale. Her world was narrowing, if only by an inch. It was becoming defined by whether she ate the morning, noon, or night, it was defined by the bile rising in her throat, by the worried looks in her friends eyes. She did the research, click the links, and struggled with the urge to think. In her mind’s eye, she could see it, little images of her past selves, before the 10lbs, 20lbs, the 50lbs, images of ghosts. It was heartbreaking to see herself fading, but she no longer cared. Her hands were frozen, no longer able to create complex rhythms on her snare, no longer able to create entire worlds with a flick of a pen. She grew dizzy on stage, stuttered through her lines, the lights making the edges of her vision go black…
“It’s poetry,” He said, glancing down at a piece of paper covered in scribbles. “You’ll like it,” She reached for the paper, the words swarming all over the place until they settled down, forming bits and pieces of sanity. Dancing on the edge of reality, dancing on the edge of gravity...Her eyes could barely make out the words, so messily scrawled were they, and her hands shook the paper way too much. But it was there. Pieces of sanity, relief, escape. A lifeline. She smiled, but didn’t say anything. She understood what he was handing her,his soul. See, all artwork was valuable to her, in the sense she used it to see and reflect people's hearts. But it was hard to reflect what was missing…
“An 1 an 2, an 3, an 4,” She heard the numbers, responded as was told, but still they was no heart, no life in it. Her steps were no longer as graceful, her head no longer held as high, the world was one giant blur...she could feel the edges escaping, unraveling…
“See, the key is to avoid over-thinking, I mean, you still have to have some level of intelligence, but if you search too hard, you’ll find no meaning to anything,” He laughed humorlessly. “Trust me, I would know,” She could tell he did know. There was something in his eyes, some remnant of pain that she could identify with. It was in his cynical laugh, his trampled-down idealized viewpoint of the world. He still believed there was hope, deep down inside…despite being proved over and over it wasn’t there...
She still found comfort in running, still used it to drown out her sorrows, but she could go only for a few minutes now. It wasn’t because of her weight(still at that dreaded 110 point), or the fact she could go a couple of days without eating and face almost no stomach pain if she really, really tried(she kept busy and focused on things outside of her body now), but because of the awful, ungodly fact that she couldn’t breath. She could hardly march a full drill now without getting out of breath, black dots dancing teasingly on the edges of her vision, she could hardly make the walk from the high school to the theatre without arriving panting, dizzy, and on the edge of panicking. She wasn’t used to being weak, she wasn’t used to being out-of-control, she didn’t like this sick, helpless feeling deep in her gut. It was too much, all it would take would be one tiny thing to set herself on edge…
