Truth. in Always Recovering, Never Recovered.

Maybe this time will be different, maybe this time you can do it.

You get ready slowly, laying in the bath, breathing carefully. Counting ribs through the ripples and trying to work out whether your hips take up more or less of the bathtub than they did last week. Your heart already falling over itself under the weight of the water, constricting too tightly; today is a bad day. Wrapping hands, encircling thighs, touching thumbs and forefingers, you still fit inside them so you must be the same size you were yesterday… right? Right? But you can’t see it today, today is a bad day.

A pretty dress you’ve never worn, a clingy flimsy froth of lace with a teasing floating hemline. Putting it on and raising fearful eyes flinching and faltering from floor to mirror; a face-off. A mantra of lies; it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay… and your heart kicking violent angry breath-stealing blows against your breastbone tells you no, no it’s not okay, it’s not okay. It looks terrible, you’re disgusting. Your foul flabby flesh spilling out of the sides, your stomach straining against every stitch of material, waterfall tyre-rolls of whalefat oozing and wobbling and squeezing and you rip it back off, what the fuck were you thinking? You can’t go out in public trussed up like a pound of raw flabby sausagemeat bursting out of a tiny cocktail-sausage skin, nausea scratches scraping fingers down the back of your throat and the air just got thicker and hotter and closer and he’s yelling up the stairs, are you done yet? And you throw on baggy leggings and a baggy top and cover it all up with a baggy hoodie and call it ready. I thought you might wear a nice dress, he says, unimpressed eyes rolled, averted, from your everpresent inelegance. Shrug. Shrug because you can’t talk right now, your voice is full of tears and that molten-magma hatred is so so close to the cracking surface and you just can’t trust yourself.

Sitting down with menus and your blood is moving too quickly, tiny platelet cyclones stirring swirling painful pockmarks in your brain. You order a glass of wine to shut up the voices and the feeling of your fat fat thighs spread across the chair and the punk-rock rapid riffing of your racing heartbeat, and everyone laughs because oh look, you’re drinking again, isn’t that funny, you can’t go out for dinner without getting drunk! And you sip sip sip and spit out a forced little laugh, because isn’t it funny how the truth hurts, hashtag LOOOOL.

And the food comes and it’s shiny, shiny with greasy poisonous petrol-slicks and slimy slippery white fat and all the laughing and the talking and the tinny tinkling background music, it’s all drowned out by the voices, by the wordless aggression of fear ripping your head apart from ear to ear and wrapping strangulation around your throat. And you spear a tiny lump of toxic lard on your fork and stare down into the smeary grease-slicks pooling on the plate and you’re paralyzed and petrified, you can’t, you can’t, you’re already taking up twice the space you should do and the earth shakes when you walk and if you put this in your mouth it will only be another step backwards, away from what you need, and you’re already breathing too fast and actually the fork is rattling against china because it’s shaking in your hand and are you even hungry? What does hunger even feel like, this can’t be it if you don’t know and you can’t eat if you’re not hungry, that’s against the rules, everything is against the rules, you made them but they keep changing when you’re not looking and you always, always get it wrong.

And you put it in your mouth and it burns like bile, your throat is closing up and kicking the back of your tongue and already the fat-maggots are feasting on the shit you just put inside you, crawling gleeful writhing wriggles across your stomach and multiplying in sickening sex orgies on your thighs and that mouthful hits your stomach like a rock and you can feel it, feel it weighing you down and your emptiness is ruined, you’re so dirty, raped by filthy food and fingernails rip your eyeballs open and oh god you’re going to cry. Chair scraped back and falling and you’ve bolted, running and choking and gulping painful shrapnel air and everything, everything hurts.

And they find you, they find you sitting on the puddled pavement in the rain, melting into the shadows of a building and just wishing you could disappear. Bags of disappointment and frustration under angry eyes, brackets of irritation scored around puckered furious lips; parenthesis for battery-acid words, why do you have to ruin everything, why does everything have to be about YOU? And you can’t find the words to say that you wish that it wasn’t, you wish nothing was about you, ever… you wish you were nothing, non-existent, just gone gone gone.

And you’re taken home in strangled silence to bolt yourself behind the bathroom door and you’re on the floor and you can’t catch your breath and the anger is so vivid, so intense, white-hot hatred pulsating and overwhelming and you let it all out the only way you know how, splitting open your plate-tectonic forearms along all the same old fault-lines, and you’re such a fucking mess.

And you have to burn away the filth you put inside you, he can’t convince you not to; he complains, you can’t explain, it’s not a choice. It’s the voice, it never shuts up and you can’t ignore it even once because it controls your breathing and owns your emotions and wraps squeezing fists around your strangulated heart; and he storms off to bed alone, slamming doors and stomping. Two hours on the exercise bike in silence in the darkness; and it’s 2am and your knees hurt and your head hurts, but most of all your heart hurts because everything you do is weird and wrong, and you’re such a fucking mess.

And what is this thing, this thing that kicks steel-capped toes into the tender backs of your knees and buckles them? This thing that smears Vaseline across your vision and everything’s so blurry and is this upright or not; which way is up and what are these bright white lights and why doesn’t gulping oxygen help? Is THIS hunger? And maybe you’re falling or falling apart and you can’t faint, you’re not going to hospital, not this time, they’ll fucking laugh at you, nobody THIS fat has a problem, not this time. So you eat cornflakes, handfuls, straight from the packet, still standing at the counter, and that play of light across your eyes is fading and your legs aren’t shaking any more but you’re not empty either; you get everything, everything wrong. And your gunshot eyes are leaking tears and your ruined wrists still leaking blood and it’s all for nothing, it’s all nothing because you’re still full of filthy dirty food and you’re disgusting, you’re disgusting you stupid worthless sack of shit.

And this is the cycle, the circle.

This isn’t living; this is life.