I still have the ballerina body; that harrowed silhouette with all the bruises, like cigarette burns in a carpet when the ash drops off. Carrie bit into a strawberry the size of her palm and didn’t pull away until her teeth had bitten right into the vein of it. At the centre, she ripped away and i almost expected blood, but it was clean. As her hand grew stickier she threw the carcass of it onto her plate. This reminded me of a cat eating a mouse and pawing away it’s head. I don’t hate food but I do feel a little indifferent. My skin itches in restaurants and when other people talk about dinner plans I feel a hotness flushing at the back of my neck - what’s the opposite of arousal? In my cheeks and I can almost hear whisperings of someone in the redness. There’s a mourning about my body. A definite grief. In moments of hunger you can hear the echoes of missed meals rippling through my stomach. I feed her now. She doesn’t accept. There’s a grief about me so that I have a slight feeling she is punishing me. I always feel a little too empty and a little too sick. There’s a shallowness to it, a coldness to my body that with reflection, I think can only be described as memory. She remembers what I put her through and so she won’t let me grow. My father tells me I’m too thin and somehow that doesn’t feel like a good thing - i think that’s growth? My sister said it got easier to eat in front of her boyfriend once they’d fucked. Then she fell in love. I don’t know what to do with that but it’s in my head a lot. For a while i used to see which boys i liked by the ones i couldn’t eat around. I wonder how many girls mistook fear for love; all those butterflies in your stomach batting to get out of their empty cage. I like the richness of food. I like the smell of it and the hedonism of it but also the health and necessity of it. I like the sociability of food, the consensus of hunger. It was a newness to eat something and keep it in. Today I ate chocolate and never reached back down for it. I worked on my assignment in the library today. Me and my friends sat in a 16:34pm sort of slumber with bright laptop screens and the hot library; the piercing cold outside had flushed our cheeks. There was a mess in front of us of paper and wrappers and coffee cups, all of it deliciously used and emptied. But us, full. Happy. Tired from the work not from the hunger. Frankie broke off a scarily massive chunk of dairy milk and put it in my palm, fairly consciously but quite automatically. It felt like an incubus. Weighty. Unnecessary. And yet, I ate it. That’s it, that’s all that happened today. I ate and everything stayed the same.