*This is Part 1 (of a 3-Part) guest-authored series on Anorexia Nervosa. This experience is one that would make a meaningful addition to the conversation around mental health.*
I stood by the window overlooking what was once a prim and poised garden; still fearfully clutching onto the memories of when I was called “chubby”, “had breasts shaped like two melons”, had “grown up too suddenly” and had “fallen in love too early and too hard”.
The wildly grown vines – now dowdy and eccentric in their flowering patterns – were a familiarly comforting territory. The orderliness of what lay on the other side of this grass scared me. I had no friends and as the sun slantingly caressed my forehead that morning, I felt a little reassured. All it would take is for me to say I ate out and there would be no one to doubt my claims.
***
My once taut skin turned leathery, flaking at the first sign of a breeze. The dark circles under my eyes threatened to dip down into the depression my cheeks became. I picked up nothing less than a fistful of hair after every wash. Soon, the rubber bands I used everyday had become too stretched out for my withered tresses. The tops I once bought as a “chubby” person began drooping off my shoulders.
***
I couldn’t remember when I last basked under the sun; but that morning, I felt like a little girl being kissed on the forehead by a grown-up man who had straddled me under his enormous power. The pink geraniums that lined the garden stood in stark contrast to the bottle-green color that now enveloped our wild garden. I’d heard that geraniums are a sturdy species. And they had poked their necks out in flowers even in this ignored space of the house. They are tenacious.
***
But this new diet made me irritable, I had a knot in between my brows that refused to go away. My stomach winced and churned when I looked at a plate of food. My body had become so meager with hunger that hunger refused to reside in me. Blackouts were a common occurrence, especially in the middle of the night when I would wake up with a startle if my blood glucose levels got too low. The next morning, I couldn’t remember what year it was.
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/meager/