Never once had he blown out his birthday candles or glimpsed a star arcing across the night sky without wringing the words through his mind: I wish I was thin.
he’d daydreamed of taking a knife and shearing the fat off his body. He’d fantasized about being impaled with tubes and having the excess sucked out of him, being pricked with needles and drained like a blister.
The never-ending humiliation and degradation, that was real.
The feeling of being trapped inside his own body, inside his own life: that was as real as it fucking came.
Sure, I felt weak and nauseous pretty much all the time; my skin was cracked and washed out; and even resting, my heart fluttered in uneven bursts, like a stray pigeon trapped inside my chest. But I was dropping weight so fast I didn’t care, each successful weigh-in encouraging me to keep going, push harder, embrace the hunger. Feel the burn. Those words became my mantra, and I lived by them.