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Sunday, May 5, 2024. 7:22 pm

  There's still sand in my checkered Vans from when Sigurd, Fabian, and I went to the beach. It's a lake beach, so there's nothing spectacular, just rocks. And, of course, the jetties. Fabian was pouting the whole time, and I don't believe in auras, but he seemed to have a bad one. It's because of something I said to him. I don't know if he reads this anymore, but a part of me just wants to break things off completely, into pieces. I don't know. I want to re-invent myself.
  It's not like I can't love; I know everyone can love, even if they say they can't. I just wonder. My mom says my heart's too big, but I remember being maybe ten years old, and flipping through a science magazine to an arcticle about empathy. I ran to her crying that I thought I was a psychopath. She says she doesn't remember. I don't know. I don't know what's wrong with me. It's been a over a year since I tried to top myself off at seventeen + the hospital put me on Abilify, so I've been pretty stable. But everywhere I look on my medical records, it's "Major Depressive Disorder, Reccuring" and no explaination for my countless sleepless nights as a young teenager, feeling too youthful in my head now, regressed, too dangerous, and too unstoppable. Sometimes, I think I'm stronger than steel...
  I haven't been writing lately, but have been feverishley tweeting my every thought, changing my look again, taking Gillette blades to my skin. There's nothing that will remain unchanged; as Silverstein says: "I will never recover from this, I will never believe in this again // I could never go back to the way I used to be before this started."
  So don't close your blinds on me, I guess. Maybe I won't end things again.
  At the beach, Sigurd rescued a butterfly from the waves at the shore. Two of its legs and half of one of its wings had been torn off, and it clung shakily to his hand, his nose. I feel like her now, that butterfly. Just hugging my philosophy major to death, begging not to return to the shore where I nearly drowned, drowned in this feeling of fading into another blank face on the street.
  Logging off for now,
  Drowning.

Wednesday, April 10, 2024. 8:09 am

  It's been one year.

Friday, March 22, 2024. 9:02 am

  Last night I went to a Mitski concert; I wore my Depeche Mode hoodie so everyone would think I was "cool" and know I was just there to make Dana happy. Dana drove us (Fabian and I) to pick up her sister, Lydia, at university, and Lydia drove the rest of the way to Chicago. She dropped us off on the side of the street by the venue. Women in long coats and Doc Martin loafers were queued up, white bows in their hair, intermingled with girls in long jean skirts, guys in athleticwear. It was all very alienating and overwhelming. I felt underdressed. We found our seats on the balcony, a small box of three seats for Fabian, me, and Dana. She kept tossing her slim, foxlike face, chestnut hair, saying: "I look stupid." She didn't. Fabian and I paid eleven fucking bucks for two packs of M&M's (one regular, one peanut) and got back to our seats; the back row had been filled by another group of three kids our age. The show was good. But the guy behind Dana was dancing like Ian Curtis the whole time, just these loose, seizing movements. He swung his arms and head. He also sung the words to "First Love, Late Spring" so loudly. Dana screamed out the title "Last Words of a Shooting Star" right before it played, and I felt like everyone could hear her, which made me feel like I really was in this world, really part of it. I'm alive. Then, I heard gagging noises.
  "Don't look now," Dana whisper-shouted to me over the music, "but the guy behind us threw up." I did look, and his head was between his legs. Promptly, he was escorted away by security and one of his friends. A cold wave washed over me; if there's something you should know, I'm violently emetephobic. Fabian and I got out of our seats and walked downstairs to the empty men's bathroom where I spouted words of hatred and annoyance while dousing my hands and forearms in soap and water. We lurked in the aisle while Mitski finished her songs, got Dana, then left right as Mitski moved on to the encore. There was no merch line, so Dana got a hoodie. We broke out into the cold, greeted by the sound of a slide trombone cycling endlessly between "The Addams Family", "California Love", and I guess another Tupac song. I think more men should get nose rings like him. People pooled around us, leaving the venue, and we all stood in a group of strangers with one goal: to cross the street. I was sort of dancing to the trombone; to be honest, the street performer should not have been on a street corner, he was too good. Another guy my age in an oversized suit was dancing too. Lydia picked us up, and we drove two hours through a mixture of K-pop hell, musicals, 2000s pop, and opera. We stopped at a Speedway since Dana was talking about a slushie from the moment we left. I got a gas-station apple pie (personal size, of course, it was the lowest calorie dessert I could find) and an Arnold palmer. When we got in the car, I put on my mp3 player and zoned out to The Downward Spiral, and woke up on the off-ramp home to a Danny Gonzalez song. By the time Fabian and I got to my house, it was 1am, and we stayed awake until 3 laughing. Now it's morning, and we're snowed in; the flakes had fallen last night, illuminated in truck headlights, streetlights, neon signs on the tops of hospital buildings, red, glowing signs for the Toyota dealership. I first noticed the snow going into the speedway, and I whispered: "It's snowing!" only to myself.
  Logging off for now,
  Drowning.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024. 8:00 am

  In every class I'm in, I'm making an escape plan in case someone "hates Mondays" or something. I made a vow to rescue Sigurd from wherever he is in the building, save his life from whichever student was unleashing their rage on us. At his old school, there were constant threats and it fucked with his OCD; he would have to wear certain clothes otherwise he thought someone would bring a gun in their backpack. When the alarm went off unexpectedly, at the beginning of the year, we were crushed into a corner in the copy room, behind a recycling bin. He was whimpering, red faced: "I don't want to die, I don't want to die." My friend Nadine and I stayed behind, even after the alarm was called a false, to coerce him back to reality. Next time, we will never, never hide. I won't talk about my escape routes here, but I've gone over them with my dad, a kind but violent man who would know how to handle a situation like that. He told me to keep my footsteps quiet, use reflections, mirrors, glass. Listen. Don't run the whole time. Walk, watch for reflections in the glass, then move fast. I think I'll take off my shoes (since they're usually big and stompy combat boots) like in Die Hard. But if I'm wearing my quieter Adidas shoes, I might keep them on.
  I need to ask my dad to take me to a shooting range or a gun club again. The last time I asked was a year ago, before my suicide attempt, and he hasn't let me round any kind of weapon since. I guess he's right. He told me that "locks keep honest men honest" and told me he knows I could smash open any safe if I really, really wanted to, if I really wanted to kill myself. So I guess he just trusts me. Which is surprising, considering all I've done.
  I really am no different than my ancestors. "Oh miserable boy," the Aeneid read, and I could feel my own image in the poem. I am just another miserable boy in a line of miserable men. Life is a killer, and I am no exception; my family is steeped in a curse. A curse of violence, paranoia, addiction... an unlucky family. Also in the Aeneid, Dido is often described with the adjective "unlucky", or just "the unlucky one." I hope talking about how I'd get away from an attack doesn't make me sound like someone on the "other side" of things, someone who doesn't understand. Because I understand. Maybe I just don't relate to all those boys throughout modern history, those boys with rifles, with bombs. I mean, it's hard for me to empathize with anything, but all those boys do is remind me of the dark part of my family that birthed my shadow self. He slips in darkness, walks in a cloak of night time and street lights. He casts himself into the deepest reaches of the internet, late at night, headphones plugged into his boombox. I spawned him at 15, but left him at 17. He's not me anymore. But sometimes I can feel his icy hand, his cold brain and heart– my heart.
  Logging off for now,
  Drowning.

Tuesday, March 5, 2024. 2:26 pm

  Made up with Fabian. Sort of. I saw my replacement therapist again. I'll calll her Eloise. Eloise and I talked about how I envision the person I want to be: lithe, straight up-and-down, androgynous, vampiric. She asked about the "androgynous" part, noting that I liked to confuse people a bit, play mind games, and also asked about the "vampiric" part. She was very interested in that. I said I wanted to be sickly beautiful. Having seen her a second time, I realized I like her more than my original red-haired, hippie therapist, and that I might want to switch to her. Eloise is a large woman with a warm, crinkled face and a curly, stringy bob. The first thing she said to me when I walked in yesterday is:
  "I noticed in your last session with your old therapist, she mentioned an 'inner child'." I laughed and said that my old therapist was "wacko". Eloise was amused. "She's not crazy, the inner child is a representation of yourself at a younger age. Think about Dissociative Identity Disorder–"
  "I don't think any of that applies to me." My voice was accusitory and a little harsh.
  "I don't either, but I want to use it as an analogy..." She proceeded to explain the process of alters created in childhood, and then how the inner child is a representation of a childhood self-state that anyone can have. I told her I didn't want to get into this "inner child" bullshit because I'm young, naive, impressionable. I don't want to talk about self-states. I don't want to think I'm something I'm not. So we dropped the topic.
  Logging off for now,
  Drowning.

Friday, March 1, 2024. 7:43 am

  Fabian and I are fighting. He refuses to admit that we are, but we are. He's convinced I hate him, that I think he's stupid and has no hobbies. Which, he does have no hobbies. All he does is lay in bed listening to New Order, and do six hour shifts at the grocery store chain. He always complains to me about lifting boxes, or taking carts of oranges up the elevator. He keeps getting his hand cut by the ice machine. One time, he spilled a box of fruit in the elevator and the whole cart tipped over; as soon as he got in the car to go home, he started to cry. My dad told me that New Order gets their bass sound by using a heavy plastic pick, which all of the guys he hung out with back in the 80s would try to imitate; I wish I lived back then. Well, it might have not worked out for a queer like me, but you know what I mean; there was a sense of novelty and innovation, tribalism, excitement. Now everything is both compartmentalized into tiny aesthetics and labels, while being homogenized at the same time. I think I'd risk an early death to experience just one New Order concert (and Fabian would probably say the same). It's not like I'm going to have a late death anyway, considering my various mental disorders, including the one with the highest mortality rate. Like I said, I've seen the end and I'm not feeling too hot about it. I hope there's a nice view outside my window. Of some nice buildings and flowering trees. Maybe some electrical towers, birds on the lines. That's the most I can hope for, really.
  I have a New Order line stuck in my head, from their version of "Run" called "Run 2" on their Best Of album: "I don't know what day it is, or who I'm talking to." Sigurd and I have come to realize that we're both just as confused in that department; sometimes, as he's told me, he puts his thoughts and actions through the lens of Edd (or "Double Dee" as he calls him) from Ed Edd n Eddy, his favorite childhood cartoon. He also talks to his child self. I have my crossdresser, or "girl" self, that I've called Zelda, short for Grizelda, the drag name I thought up a long time ago. My replacement therapist says we're just young and figuring ourselves out. And I know that. I'm not searching for a label, and I've never believed in diagnosis; the human mind is so complicated, nature's ultimate robot. There's nothing in me that can be explained by "depersonalization" or "depression" or "gender issues" or "OSDD". Neither is there any of that in Sigurd. In art class, we talked about the fakers, specifically DID fakers. I don't know why they do that. I understand that they're having some problems like us, and actually may believe it can be summed up through the diagnosis of DID, but that's just not how the mind works; they're simplifying something so beautiful and strange. Of course, there are people actually with something that needs that disorder's label to be treated effectively; there are a lot of sites on here that I quite enjoy who are systems. But I don't feel like that describes me. I don't know.
  I'll have to have a more in-depth conversation about it with Sigurd. And I don't know how I'm going to sort things out with Fabian.
  We're supposed to be working right now in AP Lit class, so I think I'll write a little more. Let me tell you a story about being sixteen. My blue bedroom had a few less posters, and no striped rug. At 7:00 or 8:00 pm I'd put on my thermal, long-sleeve shirt, then layer a sweater over a t-shirt. I'd put on my dad's leather jacket with the built-in hood, and snap the cord of my half-broken earbuds into my black and lime-green discman from the late 90s, settling the earbuds into my ears, tying my dark shoes, putting on black knit gloves. I made sure my wallet and lighter were in the bag. I'd steal my dad's Marlboro Reds back then. And I'd go out walking every night, half to burn calories and half to placate my racing mind, my empty mind, with music and cold air in my lungs. My favorite album was New Order's Brotherhood. That's how Fabian got into them: through me.
  The cold stung my narrow legs though my jeans (from the little boys section at Kohls) and my nose and throat. It ruffled my honey-red hair. I'd kept it that color for almost a year, thinking it made me look like teenage Richey Edwards with his reddish bowl-cut and teddy bear smile. Sometimes, I'd style it up in an Ian McCulloch look and wear my plaid short-sleeve button down with the kids jeans, white socks, creepers. I thought it made me look youthful and smart. But at night, I was a shade creeping darkly from street to street, shadow to shadow. Silhouetted against the Catholic church's stained glass window, the one with the burning sacred heart, I stalked on, my breath vulnerable in my chest. I always thought I looked too tough to chase after, all in black, but I was young and fragile, ripe for the picking. Luckily, nothing happened to me (and no cars ran me over, even though my clothing blended into the night) but I was always on guard. I reached my destination when the CD arrived at "Bizarre Love Triangle". The electronic bass would start up, angels' synthesizer bells chimed, and the automatic doors slid apart to let me in to heaven. Piggly Wiggly. My personal purgatory. There was something about the colorful packages, bold text, spinning aisles that made me feel like a ghost, dizzy and floating. I would find myself standing in front of the discount candy section, squishing a Snickers bar between my thumb and forefinger just to imagine that feeling between my teeth. That taste in my mouth. What would it be like, just one time, to buy a cheesecake from this fridge and eat the whole thing? What about that ice cream? Those wafers. Those chips. What about that rotisserie chicken, sweltering and tender, the package full of condensation? But I never took anything but a five-calorie drink and a protein bar for tomorrow's breakfast.
  I walked a while longer to my favorite spot on the stairs by the baseball field. I brushed dead leaves out of the way, smoked and stared at the church's spire. Then I put it out on a clump of snow, ran down into the foggy field, turned back to look at the distant lights blinking in windows, letting the sound of that plastic-pick bass wash over me.
  Logging off for now,
  Drowning.

Thursday, Feb. 29, 2024. 3:20 pm

  There's this book called The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai; I won't tell you what it's about (since you can look that up) and I won't summarize it either (since you can –and should!– read the book on your own). All the death makes me wonder where I'll die. It might be an eerie parallel to some of the scenes from the book; sparse family, an old friend, an old fling all gathered around my hospital bed, all of us watching the numbers of my heartbeat go up, go down, stay the same. Staring at my blood pressure with the systolic below 90 and the diastolic far below 60. Listening to the sound of my NG machine pump pale yellow liquid down my feeding tube, down my wet gullet, the tube taped to my skeletal cheek and fragile nose. In this scenario, it isn't a virus that leaves me predisposed to some illness, some infection; instead, it's anorexia, my love, my captor. Every time I read another death scene my heart feels sick. An electric bolt shoots through my chest. I don't want it to be true, but I know I'm stubborn; when I relapse next time, I will never, never stop.
  If I know anything about myself, it's that if I don't let the eating disorder take me, the way I die will be confusing, chaotic, and I will be very, very alone. I used to watch crime scene clean-up videos on YouTube, where they would vaccum and scrub away decomposed bodies. You'd think that there'd be a skeleton, but even that disintegrates in the end. Or melts. Or rots, becomes a calcium drip off the side of the bed, a pile on the floor. It gives me a twinge of comfort, knowing everything I hate about myself will be gone, gone in the end, eternally. The closest I've ever come to death was when I was slumped with my back against the upstairs bathroom wall, my wrist open to the tendon and gushing blood. I said "Hello?" to nobody in particular, because my ears were filled with this muffled buzzing and I was trying to see if I could even hear my own voice. I don't remember my dad throwing me over his shoulder and carrying me down the stairs, but when I look back, I can see it from the perspective of a ceiling light or a smoke detector; watching from somewhere above. In the end of The Great Believers, the main character's thoughts are a scrambled dream, and a deep part of me hates that that will be my end, a senseless, bullshit, vulgar dream. No matter how awake I try to be, I'll end up unaware that I'm finally going, or that I'd even lived at all. Maybe in the five minutes my brain has to remain active after my death, all it will be able to conjure is the taste of a "cool ranch" Dorito. I hope I dream of something calming, clean at least. A few nights ago, I had a dream that I was dead. It was my last conscious moment before being gone forever. I had found a ship on the endless blue ocean and gone inside, to a room inside a castle where all the dead rest in darkness, sprout neon seeds, and the floor is scattered with giant chess pieces and rubber ducks. There is a gash in the ceiling, a rip where warm light pours out and my hand was transparent against it. I asked why there were giant game pieces everywhere.
  "Laughter is the brightness in the loathe you call your life." A voice was speaking to me from nowhere, belonging to no one. I was screaming and screaming, saying "I'm alive! I'm alive!" as if to prove to myself that I wasn't dead, force myself to somehow wake up to my teenage room with posters collaged over the walls and stuffed animals guarding the foot of my bed. And I did. I woke up. I was snuggled in my Snoopy blanket in my beautiful blue room, with the morning sun illuminating a stripe across the posters from the crack in the windowshade, with an ache in my chest. I woke up and I was alive, and I laid there, knowing that this could never happen again, that someday, I could scream all I want but I would be trapped inside my head forever, until five minutes became an eternity of nothingness.
  Logging off for now,
  Drowning.

Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2024. 7:20 pm

  I had a breakdown yesterday and quit pit band. I didn't go to school today either; it was a spring-in-February kind of morning and afternoon, so I don't regret it. Band was making me absolutely lose it; I had taken about two years off from playng piano, so my skills are dust-covered and useless. I used to be able to play the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8 when I was fourteen, my fingers flying across the keys, forcefully, then delicately. I had the whole thing memorized –muscle memory– and would practice late at night when my parents went out for dinner (when I had first started to refuse to go to restaurants). The four flats key signature of the second movement ("B E A D") is burned into my brain. But I quit, and quit for good; I was ashamed of the disintegration of my own skills, and felt that the grey haired trumpeteer behind me with the boston accent was judging my abilities.
  A storm is cresting the highway tonight. It's such a contrast from the golden light that bathed my cat this morning, when he was sitting in the open window, the wind tickling his long orange hair.
  Logging off for now,
  Drowning.

Monday, Feb. 26, 2024. 8:57 am

  In latin class right now; we're translating the part of the Aeneid where Aeneus journeys into the underworld. He's at the banks of the Styx (or the Cocytus, or where the two meet– it's uncertain) with the sybil who leads him on his adventure. The banks are full of bodies, shades or "umbrae" waiting to cross. They were rushing to the shore, "bodies defunct of life, great heroes, boys and girls unmarried, young men imposed on the funeral pyre before the hour of their parent; who all in the forest, with the first chill of autumn, fall as slipping leaves to the ground". Charon sees Aeneus and the sybil and asks them what their "living bodies" are doing there, since this is the place of "somni noctisque soporae", dreams and the sleep of night. Sopor reminds me of Sopor Aeternus, which as I translated these passages, I realized the name meant the eternal sleep of death.
  Logging off for now,
  Drowning.

Sunday, Feb. 25, 2024. 6:12 pm

  Had pit band practice today. I play the second keyboard and am not very confident in my skills, especially because pit is on stage this show. I shake the whole time with nerves. It's a jazzy show, quite a chorus-heavy one too. The crowd of twenty or so girls transform themselves between songs; they become flight stewardesses in dark navy skirts and suit jackets with bright white gloves, nurses in paper-white dresses with caps, stretching their arms out, kicking their heeled legs. In the end, the FBI agent and the con-man get handcuffed together and cry in each other's arms. The embrace is very charged; the con-man (who is played by a boy in my art class who never stops singing) sinks into the FBI agent's baited hands, his dark curls heavy against the agent's chest. I can taste the suit material, the warm skin drenched with sweat from the burning stagelights. I can feel how tense they are, how the blonde, thin jock-who-plays-the-agent's heart is hurting, feeling the comfortable tan flesh against his shirt. It made me feel sort of sick inside.
  The boy who plays the con-man is the kind of theatre guy everyone lusts over, constructs fantasies in their heads of him rescuing them from a burning building, becoming their prince, taking out the school shooter with one perfect tae-kwon-do move and then proposing marriage right over the body. One girl in paticular clings onto him. Today, she was passing around her digicam, took a picture of him, then plopped a kiss straight on his cheek– a friendship kiss, though she's openly admitted to being in love with him before. She's a pale girl with reddish-blonde hair. One time, her sweater sleeve rode up in class and I could see a line of straight, thin red cuts on her forearm; they've faded to pale scars. In her nurse's uniform and cap, she sat with her legs crossed in the front row of the auditorium seats, watching as her beautiful boy pressed his cheek into the chest of another guy. It was part of the show, but she never stopped looking at them.
  Logging off for now,
  Drowning.

Friday, Feb. 23, 2024. 8:20 am

  Home sick with a headache today. Nothing much has happened but I want to tell a story about the time Sigurd and I went to the mall. He was having some family trouble; his Nana had died in a hospital where they hardly followed protocol or acted like decent human beings AT ALL. His friend from his old school also shot himself, in January. He had really been out of it. We sit together in art class and he would be completely focused on his work, only speaking to me. Yesterday he showed me his Nana's headstone made out of Norweigan opal, with little birds over the name and dates. He said the engravers are using it as an example headstone, because it's so beautiful.
  A week before her memorial, we went to the mall together; I thought it would be a good idea for him to take his mind off it, for just a day. That's what I did when Judy died; I spent the whole day with Fabian. So, Sigurd came to pick me up in his little grey car with a stuffed Garfield plushie in the back. A button with a big heart on it is pinned to Garfield's soft orange body, and he has a keychain that says something really stupid on his rearview mirror. Whenever he plays a song by Alex G, the small screen on the dash shows a picture of Mike Patton (who Sigurd has a massive celebrity crush on). We took a round-a-bout and got on the fast-paced country road that leads you past the house that burned down a month ago –a hoarder's house– where all the junk the two owners had collected are piled in charcoal heaps outside of the sagging garage. Both of them died in the fire. There was too much stuff in the house, and no one could reach them to get them out. We passed it, then did a loop-de-loop onto the freeway, playing Blur.
  He turned onto the wrong side of the road at the enterance to the mall, but I guided him into making a u-turn and into the parking lot. Inside, Sigurd started having a panic attack, but took two gabapentin and then was fine; we went into the thrift to look at sweaters, the Hot Topic, and the American Eagle, where my friend who moved to a differnt high school works, but we didn't see her. We waited in line for like TWENTY MINUTES at the Auntie Anne's to get pretzel bites and lemonade. I hadn't had either of those things in a long time. In the food court, there was a photo booth, and we crammed ourselves into it, shutting the faux-velvet curtain around our heads, letting the camera click-click-click away. When we went to take the printed photos, there was a whole pile of other people's photo strips just lying there; on one some woman was licking her boyfriend! Sigurd stuffed them all into his man-purse and we gigggled our way to Spencers, where out of the corner of my eye I saw him taking a peek at the boxes of sex toys. I had to explain to him what nipple-clamps were. We also went to Victoria's Secret, and he would point at the models and say "fierce!" and I would laugh, feeling a little weird about being a boy in a lingerie store.
  On our way home, we listened to TOOL as loud as possible. We sped through the dark, laughing and doing South Park voices, the farmland blurring outside of our windows. The hills of the garbage dump faded softly and darkly into the distance.
  Logging off for now,
  Drowning.

Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024. 9:16 am

  I finally figured out where the mystery bruise is coming from. My satchel, that I use as a school bag, keeps knocking against my leg when I walk through the halls. It's a relief, because I'd thought it was some sort of malicious blood clot, slowly growing, trying to strangle my leg. But it's just an ordinary, heart-shaped bruise; yellow, blue, and pewter. I've finally finished making this damn website almost functional; it still is quite an eyesore, but I like it in a way. Fabian told me that it reminds him of my pinterest boards, all mushed together.
  Fabian was my best friend since we were in eighth grade, and over the summer, we ended up getting together; he's gay, and I'm bi. He's short, sickly, and flops around without energy. He's always been like that, though getting a job at a local grocery store chain drained him even more. His hair is dark; the same texture and color of a poodle's coat. Sometimes, I wish he was different, more lively, jovial, but then I get a sort of sinking feeling in my stomach, knowing it's an awful thought. My other friend, Sigurd, is also gay. I've only become friends with him this year; he has long, straight blonde hair, greyish-white like ashes. He's a cartoonist with a pet budgie, and a fanaticism for Mr. Bungle. I got to know him through my closest friend –best friend forever– Dana, who's a 4'11, manic bottle blonde, with a pointed face and chin.
  I don't have much to say about today, or even yesterday, but on Tuesday, I went to see my replacement therapist. My usual one broke her shoulder and can't drive to work; she's this hippie style woman, the same age as my dad. She's a trip. One time –when I was complaining about how awful I felt about myself, that I was fat now, and forever distanced from the person I used to be– she gave me a flyer that said "I accept all of me". She told me to read it out every morning, and soon it would come true.
  My replacement therapist is an art therapist, and she's very curious about me, specifically my strange feelings of dissociation, and being distanced from myself. I told her that the me from the hospital was a completely different person than my actual self, he wasn't me but somebody else; every dark corridor and bright white one, every IV, every throatful of saline solution, that happened to someone else.
  "Tell me some adjectives you would use to describe yourself before, during, and after the hospital." She had an old, large body with small, strong hands.
  "Me before? How far back?" I asked, and she told me to look back six months. I was thin then, thin and cold. Full of this vicious hatred for nothing in particular, maybe myself. I used to look at gruesome pictures on the internet. "Angry." I picked at my fingernail. "Calm, but angry."
  "What about during?"
 "Neon green. Bright pink. Deep black. A pixie." I hesitated. "Now I'm gruff. Stockier. Harsher."
  I talked to her about how there was a time when I used to crossdress, over the summer, how I stopped for a time, would think "Why did I do that?" and then started doing it again. Now I've stopped again. I don't know what's wrong with me. There's nothing in my past, no reason for me to feel like this. I look back and see memories that may be slighly incriminating, but nothing criminal. There's just nothing there to even suggest my life may be out of the ordinary; my depression, OCD, eating disorder, they all must be genetic. I'm just thinking too hard, about my life, about myself, and it's causing me to sort of drift away. There's nothing else wrong with me.

4:11 pm

  I've been looking at different thinspo sites, logging on to MYFO and etc. It's difficult being forced into recovery, forced into almost a year of instability, misery. I'm 132 pounds now; bmi 22, my nightmare. I always thought I would stay small forever. I thought that ever since that spring of freshman year when I started chugging back Monster energy (which I've now become allergic to) and curbing my appetite, the weight I lost would never come back. But after the hospital, it came back. I went in after my suicide attempt, but they fed me there too; choked up with litres and litres of Boost (a liquid supplement), peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and Jell-O, I came out at bmi 21, and my parents' incessant spying has ensured that I gained even a couple more pounds. I feel like I've given into it now. Yesterday, I went with my dad to the Piggly Wiggly and bought a pint of ice cream... of the Ben and Jerry's sort. I know. I haven't had Ben and Jerry's (I'm not abbreviating it as BJ's) since I was fourteen and a bit of a binge-eater, and it tastes just as good; smooth, where the flavor is chocolate, chewy where it's cookie dough, filled with chunks of white-chocolate-peanut-butter and whatnot. It's heaven and hell, since I've never been a purger and probably will never have the guts to even try it again.
  I don't want to overload you, dear reader, whoever you are, so I'll end today's entry here and not pick it back up until tommorow, though I have so much more to get off my chest. Thank you for reading, if you made it this far.
  Logging off for now,
  Drowning.