I equate my relationship with food to a magic act. Move the food around my plate, take a bite, spit it in my napkin. Ta da! It's gone. Magical, right? Inside I praise myself for giving the illusion that I am fine, just fine, while also rejoicing that I did not give in to the sin of food sliding across my tongue and into my stomach where it makes me grow big and grotesque. How can I be the girl in the vanishing box if I don't even fit in the box?

My whole life has been about finding love. Feeling it from someone else and most of all not feeling it towards myself. Ugly. Fat. Muffin top.  Thunder thighs. Words attacked me, sticking to my senses, numbing them to the beauty that I could have been. I wanted to be described as delicate. Characterized by a fine structure or thin lines. I figured out in college, that the best way to be slight and slender was to simply not eat. The thread count of my sheets was more than my caloric intake and I found that the more I grew in, the more people took notice. A stranger came up to me in the store as I filled my basket with rice cakes, celery and soda water and told me that I was beautiful. That day I put the rice cakes back. I had never been beautiful. Funny, that when I started killing myself was when I finally felt alive and loved.

At night when I lay in bed, my fingers played a tune over the hills of my ribs to which I plotted out how to eat less the next day, all the while chanting less is more. Less is more.  Like the wings of a bird who was to weak to fly my shoulder blades popped like wings trying to break through the delicate skin of my back. There it is again, delicate. Such a pretty word used to describe pretty people. When I was freezing in the 100 degree heat of August, I felt that I could still lose that last ten pounds. When the bones of my spine began to peek out and I began to bruise from hugs, I felt I had finally achieved the definition of the word. Adjective. Requiring careful handling; not to be rudely or hastily dealt with.

Despite the pleadings from my boyfriend, Ana became my best friend. She taught me how to perform magic. Make the food disappear through slight of hand. I knew my disorder hurt him, but it was to hard to talk about my desire to disappear and achieve delicateness so my apologies were disguised as gifts. Movie date: I'm sorry I threw up your mothers Thanksgiving dinner. Tickets to a concert: I'm sorry I spend all my energy resisting food and am too tired to go out with you. A new watch: I'm sorry you have to spend your time watching me die. We fight. I must eat, I'm so frail. I don't like that word he uses to describe me. Frail is weak and sick. And I wish to be neither. I long to be called delicate, like a beautiful flower that is held up by a thin stem. He says I had a beautiful figure once and I know he just wants me to be healthy. Health makes me cry and I do not want a figure, Of any kind. And I know his version of beauty is the flesh that I need to starve from from my hips and thighs.

I spent hours staring at images of women whose bones shone through their skin. I thought it was the most beautiful thing. I found truth in saying’s such as “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” I  needed these images, this “thinspiration”, because I couldn’t envision a world where I could inspire anyone while my thighs rubbed together. My desire for connectivity and support was fueled by theses images of women just like me striving for perfection, aiming to be delicate.

When you're a young woman and you feel like the connecting point is through the hatred or the shame that you have around your body, that becomes so dangerous. The hunger for love is so much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread. I’ve learned that it's easier to grow in and believe that you will never live up to the "thigh gap" and hollow bodies of those portrayed as epitomes of beauty, then it is to grow out and to love yourself while looking in the mirror that society says shows the most important part of you. We are taught to love what we are not. We are taught to aim for a goal that requires killing ourselves to achieve it. And I hope I survive long enough to learn the most important lesson: There is so much that tastes better than skinny feels.