I'm stuffed, and I desperately wish I wasn't. Not enough to puke. Yet. Unless depressive chaos sneaks up on me, fast and hard as a moving train, and rams straight into my stomach.

I thought it was quite improbable just a half hour ago, now I can hear it on the horizon. Nostalgia does that to me. And oh, do I have so much--too much--to remember.

My best friend for seven years. My sister in soul, and according to some rumors, my lover. Never true, but there came a time that I wish it was true.

First we had made up an imaginary world, filled with vampires and ghosts and underworlds, that tied our hearts together with imaginary secrets. It went on far past childhood, far past the time when we knew with no doubt it was all so painfully fake. At the fall, it was the starving, fraying strand that tried to keep us close.

We gorged ourselves on macabre movies, sick pranks on idiot jocks, and the looks of strangers when we walked down the common streets in elaborate costumes of every kind. The strangest kids you've ever met, I assure you. Crazy to the point that we were just on the edge of insanity.

I'm quite grateful for all those memories. It gave me my personality and tastes, queerly eccentric in a way that tends to mesmerize...

But where did it all go wrong; wasn't it bound to happen? We were a bunch of sick souls, starving and lost but raised in too much of an upstandingmiddleclasswhitesurburban home to be too far gone. Yet.

Summer after freshmen year she chases sleeping pills with vodka. Wakes up fine enough. Fall and winter is a flurry of confusion. A laughing, jittery thing that attached herself to someone else. No worries, she's done it before. I wait for her, like I've always waited. She acts strange though. Drinks five coffees a day, eats only fruit, says her pants are too small on her. Cuts class, drops grades, never washes her hair. I thought it was normal, she set my dial for normal, her world was mine. Though in reality, this was never true.

Crack and occasional heroine. Her dirty little secrets, kept from everyone. Only told me the day she threw it all out. Now we play the game of withdrawal, like tugging an unconscious body from a raging sea. It mended us, but now we were no longer children. We were dark angels dancing in the night, full-fledged in our sickness. You could hear it in the songs we played.

Not that this masquerade lasted for long. Right after our sweet sixteen trip to Las Vegas (how's that for symbolism?) her mother found out, sent her to a psyche ward for two agonizing weeks.

I drank so hard, bled so much, died so often--not just those weeks but the whole year. We had started fighting constantly months before, and I would literally shake when I got a text from her saying that she wishes I would die or leave her alone. Or tells me that I would be nothing without her.

Suffice to say, she stopped talking to me completely over the summer before junior year. Ignored my texts, calls, messages, everything. That summer was a hell of the same, magnified by complete aloneness.

But after...after, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Nevertheless, memories are memories and cherished to the end.

For breakfast I had made myself icecream--wtf?, you might ask, but you see I was happy that morning. Too often for me, happiness=recklessness.

And then comes a stroke of fate, I suppose, when my mother got angry. She is the type of person who can explode at you for a split second, and then be fine the next. But in that split second I lose my appetite, and for many seconds after I think about the disgusting thing I have poised to enter my mouth. I shove the icecream in the freezer.

Fast forward to approximately 12 hours later. After going on a nice little family walk in a park, we stop by Baskin Robbins armed with coupons. Again she gets mad, just for a second. I was sort of cranky from getting bug bites, and really it was just a glitch in a conversation. Nibbled by one spoonful, ignored on the car ride, and again shoved into the icy safe.

So counting only solid foods, I've had one roll of bread today. Not that eating icecream instead of meals would be any healthier...

I don't mean to make my mother sound like a horrible person, because she isn't at all and I couldn't imagine a better mom. Everyone has faults. My fault is that I can't cope with the silliest things. I think I might be emotionally retarded...

I have an idea as to why I can't eat when people around me are upset. The decision, which was already tentative, is reversed by mental force. Thinking about Ana takes me away from where I am, from what's around me. Suddenly the world is consumed by my corporeal body and my mental soul. The transparency of my hand, revealing bones and veins, becomes an enchanting work of art. The empty peace of my stomach, the frailty in my core--it helps convince me that I can disappear. When the world outside is storming, peeling away layers into the rawness of life...perhaps I can just disappear.

I got four hugs today. Can you believe that? The concept is so new to me, this gesture of affection from friends...

First was earlier today. I was talking to my mother on the phone, and she is a person that stresses out very easily--I just wasn't in the mood to deal with it. Actually, it was more precisely a mood of guilt and anger combined, the awful feeling of carrying blame while being frustrated at the insincerity of empathy. At the end of the conversation she says she needs to bring over a dress for a ceremony type thing tomorrow. I say I always wear stockings with them.

"Well you don't need stockings."

"I always wear stockings."

"This time you won't"

"I need to wear stockings. I don't not wear stockings."

"Why?"

"...Because I have SCARS, mother."

"What, on your knees?"

*long pause* "No."


Could anyone be any goddamn thicker? Any more unintuitive? Especially because she KNOWS about them. My psychiatrist pried it out of my mouth and into her ears, and that's the last I heard of it. I thought she might take a hint since all summer I've been saying how I don't wear shorts. Emphatically.

So that made me look sad I guess, or some nondescript depressed face, so my roommate hugged me out of nowhere. And then later that day we had to sneak in from the entrance of the dorm to my previous camp, and my dormmates there saw me from the lounge and came out so excited and hugged me. Hugged me. As if I was actually interesting enough and valued enough to be missed.

My old best friend, a girl who kept me tied to her wrist, the product of an only child from divorced parents resulting from an affair--we never hugged. We were almost too close to do it, like twin sisters. I am so glad she is gone, so I can have these normal, childish experiences that I have missed out on.

Damn it. Just three days into this new engineering camp, and someone seems to like me -_-

Just a normal guy, no one worth an affair (please just throw me into hell right now. I am a horrible person that is apathetic to relationships, and I do warn M of it as best I can. But I might as well be candid here because if I were reading my blog as not-me, I'd be happy to know I wasn't alone in my inhumane transiency)

I initially didn't mention my boyfriend because I thought it might be awkward, and now it is way too late to mention him because I'll look like a tease. Ugh...well at least something fairly interesting has been started :P

And since I'm pretty much obsessed with Pro-Ana blogs (the ones written with intelligence and eloquence, that is) I might as well make a note about my own ED. It is currently non-existent. I know that sounds hypocritical, that I really don't have an ED--and you know what, maybe I don't. But depression, anger, hopelessness, self-esteem, and simply being in my own house often trigger it. Right now I am eating too much, very literally. After this camp I will have excuses plenty for wrecking any semblance of health that I now have.

Okok, this shall be more cheery than the other posts. I'm in a cheery mood, for no reason at all :D Being stuck in a highly monitored dorm room without people around is rather frustrating, however...

I'm thinking about taking advantage of the situation, with all meals everyday in a place that has a salad bar, and a gym down the stairs. Have a fancy diet plan and everything. If I don't have any other excuse, it would be that I'm bored to hell.

I want to talk to all you lovely people, gods what I'd give to have every one of you as my neighbor... Please don't hesitate to talk to me on aim (my sn is mystauricxcrypt) because I am lonely and in need of good conversation *cue puppydog eyes*

Today I went to a meeting thing at an art school that I attended during the spring. It was all about graduating seniors and the wonderful colleges they got into--Brown, NYU, Cornell, etc. With all the help from [insert art school name], they had gotten into these beautiful places of-their-choice.

I can't help but think in black-and-white. The whole time I was waffling between "I can do this no problem" and "I've done nothing of note all these years, I'm screwed". Either way, I can't sit still. I have to salvage something from my high school career that doesn't involve depression, broken friendships and vices.

I want to join clubs, volunteer, enter science competitions, do internships, enhance my portfolio, start a sport, tutor kids. I want to do all the things I was supposed to be doing since the beginning, I want to catch up and pretend that the antisocial suicidal girl trapped in a toxic friendship had never existed.

I also want to be a framed picture of prosperity. I want to mingle with urbanites in dimly-lit New York clubs, dressed in sophisticated taste. I want to adorn my eyes with shadow, lengthen my legs with heels and be draped in fabric that suggests delicacy. I want to be the intellectual beauty, the girl who is everything.

And then what? Do I put all of the hard work of being the best aside by giving in to love? Love, which does not see looks nor accomplishments, love that is blind to all that you carry, baggage and riches alike. Or do I remain in the only place I've ever called home--hedonism and independence and vagrancy. The place for people like me, people who see the movie of life and shout "That's it? What the fuck this is NOT what I paid for."

It's all fun and games, trying to make it all worth something while insisting that it's worth nothing. Seeking only fun and success, avoiding relationships simply because we are terrified that we won't feel them.

I think that it probably looks sad from the outside. Though we demon angels laugh at the peons who are half-blind, I think they--the normal people--I think we look pitiful to them.

I'm home for the weekend, which mainly means an opportunity to commit any of the vices that I'd like. So happy about my breakfast of strawberries, when all I could think about was icecream and donuts and poptarts. Followed by exercise because at the time it felt like the most purposeful thing I could do. Though I still have summer assignments and hobbies and college-app-fluffing activities to do...

I loved seeing M yesterday. It was one of the rare times when kissing felt delicious, not just in its meaning but in its touch. I wish I could be held all the time--except, of course, when I do the shameful things that I do. I push people away at those times, and when I realize what I've put in jeopardy, it just serves to make me cut deeper.

I wish I didn't have to be so goddamn depressing, haha. It's just that as of late it's been hard to feel much of anything--I'm pretty sure I can blame the sertraline (Zoloft commonly, I think). A few weeks ago I tried to come off it but I went through a horrible withdrawal, like near-suicidal depression. Now my psychiatrist says I can't try it again until the end of next year...

But Gods how I want a high, a bit of hypomania. Care to share some Amp, anyone?

So I've finally gotten internet here at my dorm. Took me long enough to figure the damn thing out...

I feel awful. I would like to throw up incredibly right now, or feel emptiness on demand. It's so goddamn funny, because I like to assure my boyfriend (let's say M I guess) that he is not the cause of all my pain and numbness and my inability to love. And at the same time, I want to drink and bleed and cry and yell in some blind stupor every hateful thing I wish to say.

I don't even know what I want to say. I don't love you (because I don't have a soul)? You're naive and don't understand what you're saying? You will never change me? I want to hold up bloody wine bottles and prove just how much this fracture of reality is killing me.

And keeps me from dying. Before him I was committed to Ana, zealous in my desperation. Completely turned my back to any semblance of love, in the pursuit of hedonism. The real question is, is that who I am? Because hard as I try, I can't love like in the fairytales, like in the poems and in the movies. Maybe I'm not wired that way. Not human enough.

I'm enduring an awful sugar-caffeinated headache, due to my extremely malnutritious (and worse, high-caloric) breakfast of cookies, blueberries, and two cups of coffee. I have no intentions of eating lunch now...

So my camp--I was, surprisingly, perfectly fine. I used to have social anxiety, though you would detect no trace of it if you were there with me last week. The biggest thing I have discovered so far is that I can survive on my own (except finding my way around, for some reason...)

It makes me frustrated because now I just want to up and go, skip the last year of high school and experience the world already. Really, what separates a precocious minor from an adult anyway? Being stuck in this house in the middle of suburbia is going to drive me closer to the core of desperation--booze and sad songs, and smoking next to the ruinous buildings of my present nowhere.

My roommate was named Charlotte. I say "was" because she left this week, sick of the boring lectures and the sweaty dorms and of being far away from her real life. She lives in the city, goes to an art school and has a place in The Hamptons.

She told me about a girl in her class that was big-boned whilst all her friends were petite stick figures. This girl became anorexic. She etched FAT in blood onto her arm. "Other people cut for attention, but she was the one person that really meant it," she said to me. "Now she's locked up in a mental hospital."

And all I could think was, "I'm not that bad."

A Prologue

Ok, so a little about me now.

Tomorrow I'm going to a sleep away camp, for the first time. I'm nervous as much as I'm excited, haha. The stories I've heard from people, making friends for life out of their roommates, I can hardly wait to see what it's all about.

I have a boy who loves me terribly, whom I don't--can't?--love back. Actually no, I do love him but it's not him. I love what he does for me, I love that someone actually cares, I love that I'm not alone anymore. But there would have to be something more, something concretely pure, if it were true love right?

I have an empty stomach and parents that are worried underneath their cool exteriors. Read so many blogs today, accumulating all the peeps I've been following for months surreptitiously. It's pretty inspiring, makes me feel proud at my lightheadedness. And after a point, you feel as if you're walking on clouds....

Maybe I won't cut back so much when I'm at camp, around fascinating new people. It might be a few days till I get back to this, but yeah, wish me luck :)

Here We Go

First post, here it goes *crossfingers*: Hello all of, my name is Aurora. This blog is not going to be exactly pro-ana, though if Ana is on my mind then so be it. It's more about who we are, the people who make these blogs filled with nostalgic thinspiration and lostness. Because I've read so, so many blogs--I've only recently joined blogger because my computer is decrepit and wouldn't let me get an account for the longest time, haha.

My life is not the most exciting, especially now, in the summer. But I ponder about everything and anything, and I think (mind you, think) that I know what us collectively--the "Anagirls", condemned by the media as fanatical cult members--what we really think. So that's what I want to write about.

Because it's not really about eating disorders, it's about perfection. Before I felt it, I thought the whole thing was taken up by bleached blondes who dumbly and sadly fell into obsession. I was incredibly wrong.

It's a yearning for the eliteness of perfection, articulated by beautiful photographs of long-legged girls draped in clothing. It's just one aspect--a career is one, a true love is another, discovering the world in its entirety is yet another. So easily it can start with thinness. Beauty breeds confidence, confidence breeds motivation, motivation breeds great minds that go out doing great things.

I know how faulty this rhetoric is--believe me, the trials and tribulations will soon come up in later posts. But I like logic, and honest to the Gods, it feels right. (now cue The Book of Right-On by Joanna Newsom, pretty please)