untitled one hundred

Needed to sleep. Needed to wake. Needed to get up. Needed for the mirror, oh, definitely, definitely needed for the mirror. Needed to speak. Needed to keep quiet. Needed to laugh. Killed time. Killed the boredom. Draped a thick veil over long hours spent on nothing. Swapped sadness for blackness. Upside down, the frown, speaking laughing words at furniture now and doubled up in bed she realises, this is fun, this is fun. We’re having fun. Kills the burn, anyway, numbs it, her head, her stomach, she grabs at her hips and they hurt like they’re hollow. Not tonight. No food, no, not for days, she doesn’t need it. A success. A miracle. She is finally above average. Grabs at her hips. Fingernail bruises, hers, other people’s, both. Lovely hips. Lovely bruised hips. Watch the clock. Hours passed. Struggles for words and chokes. Occasionally spewing out the odd verse but oh, it’s terrible, you’re an amateur, go back to doing what you do best. So she waits. Waits for redemption. Waits for salvation. Waits for love, no, she knows something is missing but she hopes to God it isn’t that. Waits for everyone to leave the house so she can sneak out of her room into the kitchen where she steals all of the gin and chokes on huge mouthfuls of cereal and toast and scrambled egg and last night’s grotty leftovers and staggers to the bathroom and shrinks and shrinks and shrinks. Can’t write anything honest. Unpublishable. God no. Go back to doing what you do best, and she knows she can lose a long weekend in a blur of prescriptions and bottles and pathetic texts she doesn’t remember sending and the lucky last and lost kilogram and she can do that damn fucking well and so she does, oh, she does. The lucky last kilogram she swore would be the last kilogram but there never is a last kilogram and there never will be. She knows. She is aware. She is aware of her awareness, she is safe in the knowledge that this will kill her. It will be slow. It will be painful. Inevitable. Sacrifices must be made.

Remember once, you were too scared to have someone else see you undressed, uncovered. Never more now, you stand shivering and clutching your arms, vulnerable in the moonlight that accents each protruding rib. Never more now, waking up confused, sheepishly asking where the nearest pharmacy is. “I’m going to go home and sleep,” you laugh, kiss on the cheek, I’ll text you. Three packets of crisps and a chocolate bar and four slices of toast, generously buttered. Get rid. No sleep. Blur. Indiscernable.You ache. Repeat cycle, knowing if you stopped you would be forced to think about love and life and death and Hell, Heaven, meaningless to some, but in lacking, would make this whole charade pointless… living for nothing,.. dying of physical and emotional exhaustion, of boredom, those long nights you spent staring at the medicine cabinet. Living knowing you are a flicker, a cheap lighter struggling in the wind, hurriedly mocked by its shamefaced owner- God? - and tucked away into a back pocket again. To believe in Heaven would increase The Fear. To stop believing would end it abruptly, something ridiculous, probably combined… drunk then pills then cuts then some flying leap, unnecessary at this point, insurance. What’s the point of living for nothing? No grand prize. Still. I will not go to Heaven. If it is indeed a place, Too many wrongs. Unrightable. Unstoppable. Inevitable, inevitably, got home that night and prayed for the first time out of fucking desperation and remember nothing. “If you are there. You must be. Don’t make this whole thing futile.” No response.