I overslept. Great start to the year.
I keep getting butterflies and knots in my stomach because I keep thinking about what what will happen with the girl I've been dreading seeing for the last month.
I will call her Rebecca on here for the sake of anonymity. Her name isn't Rebecca; it does start with an R though.
So a bit of backstory. She was best friends with Charlie originally (back in the days when Charlie had curves and red hair), and I was good friends with Charlie. Rebecca had been at boarding school previously and was kind of an enigma with all her tales of boarding school woe and the crazy shenanigans they used to get up to (running away, hitching lifts with strangers, taking drugs in the dorms, pranks on the teachers, etc.).
September 2010, start of sixth form, we started hanging out in a group: me, Charlie, Rebecca and "Caro". We all had some sort of problem; it probably wasn't the healthiest group of friends to be in, but long-awaited acceptance must be accepted in whatever form it may come. We understood each other. Towards the end of the year, Rebecca and Charlie started to drift apart quite considerably. This is when Charlie got all neurotic about her work and began dating this guy that we all hated. Me and Rebecca started hanging out more, finding more in common. At this time my eating disorder was sort of slowly re-emerging after a couple of years of dormancy. Nothing too dramatic, but it's important to note that it was re-emerging naturally and slowly of its own volition: Rebecca had nothing to do with the fact that my eating 'issues' were re-surfacing. It's also important to note that at this stage she ate freely with little interest in dieting or losing weight. She ate double what I ate, quite easily. I was the friend with more problems, if you're viewing it comparatively.
So, as our friendship became stronger and more intense we became somewhat the 'hub' of the group. Things revolved around us, we set up dates to hang out, we hung out the most. I wish I could remember accurately, where the lines got blurred, but I think she copied me. Because at some point early last year she went on her first 'diet' of 1,000 calories a day and lost a few pounds and got all excited. The beginning of last year is so hazy. All I remember is lots of smoking off her balcony and lots of loud music and drunken evenings in her flat and frozen yogurts from the frozen yogurt shop and the best conversations of my life and the knowledge that I could share anything and everything with her. Suddenly it is summer and we are both on 600 calories a day and utterly involved with each other and there is no room for anyone else.
If the joint dieting came first, the mania came second. This is also where the bingeing started.
All summer none of us had heard from her; she'd disappeared from the world and locked herself away in a secret place. Wouldn't pick up her phone, or read texts, probably didn't come out of the house once. She told me upon return in September that she'd been depressed and tried to kill herself by chasing a bottle of painkillers with a bottle of tequila. It hadn't worked. She'd made herself throw it all up and passed out on the bathroom floor. I should mention that her parents were away for a month at this point so no one knew about it, except now me, and later, Caro and Charlie.
Initially, a manic trip with Rebecca would have been: Having starved for a week straight, having lost seven pounds in five days, eating 300 calories a day in unison. Then going out after school, to the park, breaking our diets with a chocolate bar or a packet of crisps. Then saying 'fuck it' and going to the bakery section in Tesco and buying little boxes of cookies or doughnuts and a giant bag of crisps and more sweets and bars of chocolate. Then going to Pizza Hut or McDonalds (never before meeting Rebecca had I defiled my body with fast food and it was poisonous, yet horribly addictive) and putting in a big order. On a high now, laughing hysterically, people staring at us and the mountains of greasy fried food on our table, thinking 'How the hell do they stay so skinny eating all that shit?!' We'd finish up, full to bursting but still ecstatic, sky-high off bingeing and each others' presence. Then we'd trek back to hers, usually enjoying the comfort of a taxi (her parents shelled out piles full of cash on a regular basis to make up for their perpetual absence). There, we'd eat up the entire contents of her fridge and cupboard. Cheese, chocolate, peanut butter (straight out the jar), leftover pasta, chicken, toast, marshmallows, cereal, ice cream. I would become stuffed to the point where I thought my stomach was actually about to rupture. This left me rolling in pain with an abdomen swollen beyond belief and often feeling like I was going to throw up involuntarily.
Sooner or later these trips became routine and they became planned. All week we'd be thirsty for a binge, all the things we'd eat, we made lists; each week it would get more hideous, each time the punishments would be more severe and involve even more excessive laxative-taking and fasting. Then she started throwing up. She got a buzz from how good she was at it and how easily it came to her. She used to get me to run hand-dryers for her in public bathrooms.
Then in early November I decided, after much thinking and consideration over the toll all this bingeing/fasting would take on my body, I decided to quit it. I wanted out. I wanted to eat 1,500 calories a day, every day. I wanted to have normal lunches again with my friends. I wanted to be normal and to recover. So I told her all this. That I wanted to give it all up: the entire package. No more bingeing. No more starving. No more laxatives, diet pills, caffeine pills, fasting, puking, all the rest of it. Evidently she didn't like it because she got very upset and preceded to tell me how insensitive I was; essentially she felt like I was leaving in the ditch we'd dug for ourselves, alone. She was in the black hole and she wanted me to be down there with her, she didn't want for me to be able to escape. Maybe it's because she felt worried that our entire friendship, almost, had become about this eating disorder-shaped monster, and that if I gave it up, we'd have nothing left. Then, a week later she came round and told me she was going to join me in this decision.
Then, she got sick a few days later, and disappeared again. This time it was for 6 weeks.
Long story short: I moved on. We (me, Caro, Charlie, Tina our other friend) got tired of her antics and decided not to bother with it any more. The disappearing act was getting so tedious and she wouldn't even ring to let down friends: she stood us all up consecutively over the course of a week.
Week before Christmas: chirpy message telling us she'd been ill, blah blah blah, wanted to see us all.
Not good enough. I'd been going through some of the worst shit I'd ever had to deal with, and my entire support system had ditched out on me for over a month. She rang me consistently. I didn't pick up. Then I sent her a brief message saying I wasn't ready to talk, she hadn't been there for me (or anyone else for that matter) in weeks and it was just a little too overwhelming to talk about it all now. Then, two days before Christmas, she called me up: told me she didn't have time for the 'drama' I'd instigated and nor did she have the time to 'be my best friend anymore'. So that just about finishes it all off.
Really the stuff of the playground, isn't it?
I need to leave now, I'm really late... And I have no idea why the fuck it's so cold, my window is sealed shut.
