After chain-smoking four cigarettes, I've noticed that I smoke them incredibly slowly. I can't really help it; I want to savor the flavor, as long as humanly possible. Though, crying during the act, is incredibly distasteful, literally. The cigs get wet with each tear-drop sliding down your cheek, as if it were coating the cigarette in your despair.
My boyfriend, B, and I broke up on the 5th of February, 2012, from our four month long relationship. A relationship that I uprooted my entire like for; a plane ticket that moved me from Virginia to Iowa, 800 miles away from my family circle. I was and still am devastated; he was my anchor to the real world, and to a fantasy life. One where I hadn't been raped. He stitched me together, healed some of most gaping wounds. Every time we slept together, it was, for me, a release of the demons I held inside, all the pain, anger, hurt, misery, and trauma. For once in my life, since the cruelest rape, I felt okay, almost normal.
His being a sex addict though, changed the dynamics of our relationship considerably. He didn't require sex night and day, but it consumed him, just like binge-eating consumed him. He would search tumblr, porn sites, and google for pictures to put in his spank bank. I often found images of naked women on a tumblr blog, still open on his phone. On twitter, he flirted with his followers, and after I snooped in late January, I found he was chatting about me with another girl, saying he 'didn't want to be in a relationship right now' and her reply, 'then you break up with her.' That was it for me, all the heartache I needed to send me over the edge into the blue of depression.
My eating diminished to 300 calories a day, which was a plus in my book; the only good that came from the end of our relationship. I went from 140 to 120 in a few weeks' time.
I wear a shield daily: makeup, gray-wool peacoat with a thick scarf, once-tight jeans that now bag about the hips–I feel relieved each time I need to heft them up.
And bones. I’m not skinny, not really, but I feel the barrier between my flesh and my skeleton shirnking each day. I trace my prominent collar bones, the handles of my hipbones (a term my B coined), and bones of my knees and arms, a visible accomplishment. My eating disorder is protection; this is what keeps me secure from my emotions, my break-up, the love I still hold for him.
Starving is the only thing that dulls the pain.
