One is the loudest number...

I have spent most of the last four days in hospital alone, even during those rare times when I am in room with other people, I have been completely alone. Alone with my own thoughts, and my longest standing companions - the eating disorder voice and the borderline/emotional voice. I have been alone with them before, many times; but here, in this place, this now I am in, I am actively trying to distance myself from them. Push back those dark thoughts and sinister whispers, not find comfort in their familiar, safe notions. Every murmur from one or the other must be silenced, their cold caresses must be turned away. I can feel them there, prowling the borders of my conciousness and searching for a weak spot. They still find me in my dreams, but during waking hours I must reject them despite the loneliness that fills me.

In that loneliness, I wish I could tell you that I found my own voice, or some hidden reserve of strength and determination. Instead I have found a nothingness that scares me more than any cruel taunts from my old friends. I have had nothing to do but search for that one friend they say you should always believe in, yourself. Is it as I have long feared, that the creature that used to own this body is lost forever? That without my eating disorder, and my self loathing and hatred there is nothing left of the girl who once was. Who laughed easily, who loved deeply, who joyfully buried herself in books and film.

The longer I spend with myself, the more certain I am that I died long ago. I dig deeper and deeper, desperation clawing at my throat and clenching my heart until it seems to stop for a moment. As if it knows that if I loose my dark playmates, there will be nothing left to run this wretched, scarred shell it pulses inside. Here and there I find pieces of broken thoughts, breadcrumb trails that lead to old hurts now long forgotten and cold memories best left where they lay, in the past. The longer I am left to wander my own mind, fruitlessly, the harder it is to stand against that gentle caress of escape. If I keep looking and finding nothing, I don't think I could bear the knowledge that I had destroyed myself. For the quick kiss of a razor, or numbers on a scale. To have thrown it all away for such valueless things; to have allowed a life with its endless possibilities to become an existence; to have hurt myself more than any other. It would indeed be too big a burden.