A Thousand Years

I have been trapped in the underworld for a thousand years. 

     Sometime ago I slipped and fell, and I have not regained the strength needed to return to my feet.  Instead, I have stayed down and built a safe haven for myself in a world that is unyielding and unkind.

     Down here, the sickness is the only one I have to please.

     And while it seems so uncomplicated, so tangible, so easy, to simply not eat, you soon realize you were a fool to believe you could exist like a plant instead of a human, scolding yourself for flirting with the notion that you could draw nourishment from the air.  Soon, you stumble upon the realization that you are a selfish, ungrateful, gluttonous girl who deserves nothing but her own shame.

     I am that girl. 

     Or, at least, I used to be.  At the moment, I'm not quite sure who I am.  I feel as though I am nothing, but surely I am something, right?  I am all I have.  I must be enough, yet I feel like I am prisoned inside this evil illusion of nothingness, trapped and unable to breathe. 

     I feel like I have not breathed in a thousand years. 

     My life is both familiar and foreign at the same time.  By now, everyone has heard of me and of my story.  There is nothing special about me.  I am sadder than some, not as sick as others.  I am that girl who is "perfect just the way she is", and acquires "so much potential".  To some extent, this is true.  I am, after all, the only person who is exactly like myself, so I must be the most perfect me there is in the world. 

     If this is so, then tell me, why do I feel as though I have disappointed everyone I have ever known?

     I feel as though I am the shell of my old self, trapped in one of those sinister carnival mirrors that steals your reflection and hands you back a distorted portrait that is like you in every way, but is somehow altered and offbeat in the most uncanny manner.  Over and over, you tell yourself that this reflection must be the you you've known all your life; after all, it has your huge green eyes, your honey colored hair, and that little freckle beside you eye. 

     Of course that's you, Rosie, you tell yourself.  It has to be.

     Trust me, darling, it is not you.  You ceased to exist when you gazed into the mirror and mumbled something like, "I wish I was thinner," and sold your soul to the only sickness in this world that will leave you for dead but watch and laugh as you did your own grave. 

     At some point in this awful game of who can eat the least and run the farthest and need the littlest, we have to realize that this strange sickness we so readily claim gives us control, is a deceitfully decorated fabrication.  Though we're not supposed to technically acknowledge this, the disease is the one who controls us, defeats us, starves us, and sets us back a thousand years, to a time and a place where we are nothing more than a scared child curled up on the cold title of the bathroom floor, stomach knotting in hunger, body riddled with scars, clutching a heart that has not felt safe in a thousand years. 

     This sickness is secretly a trap, a deception, a mockery of the truth we all at some level have chosen to forget.

     After all, it's all lies, darling.