I lasted in education long enough to reach High School.

If you ask my Dad, he’ll tell you that’s where my ‘issues’ started. The peer pressure got to him he’d say, Kurt’s a very impressionable boy. Everyone was content with that you see, blocked out on paper and pinned up for everyone to analyse and calculate. He’s reacting like a typical teenager. that’s what the school counsellor said.

What they didn’t know was, at that point, I was reaching goals and counting calories the same as I had been doing for years. Those weren’t my early days, just my most obvious.

I was praised by my gym teacher there, though. She thought it was wonderful how eager I was, running faster than anyone else, staying longer for extra ‘practise’ and clocking more hours in the gym than most jocks. She said it was a wonderful surprise to see someone take such a keen interest in their health. I think I laughed in her face. Then I went back to working the fat away from my bones.

Unfortunately that’s when I hit 85 and I fell too many times through the hallway and teachers had to drag me out of the ground and students laughed as I was taken down to the nurses office over and over. Low B.P, slow pulse, drastically low potassium and blood sugars. It was no longer just peer pressure and a little issue with food. It was dangerous serious. This is where they figured out that it was impossible that I could have gotten that good bad that quickly, I was well practised in the art of killing starving myself slowly.

I went straight from freshman to prison inmate.

When I got released a couple of months later (110), Dad was too scared to send me back. He thought it would trigger me or something. So he locked me up at home, hired someone at the garage to take over his job and did all the accounts at home. He watched me 24/7, it was weeks before I was allowed to go back to my basement, I camped on the couch in the living room and worked through the shrinks tight routines.

All it did was make me sneakier.

I was back down to 90 within no time. I was also back in hell then too. They gave me crazy candies this time, pink and yellow and blue, pretty pretty colours so the small minded children would swallow them with no problems. They made me drowsy and numb and I forgot I was human for a few days or months or years, I lost any sense of existence I had.

So one night I worked a bedspring through the mattress and dragged it once twice three times across my arm, the veins ripped open and I bled red red red all over the white prison floor. They said it was bad, naughty naughty Kurt that isn’t what we you want, but I felt human again and that was all it took.

After that I wasn’t just that kid who needs to eat, I was that kid with the bandages and the scars and the stained bedclothes.

100,97,101,98,99,92,95,90.

My fluctuating weight had the doctors doubting themselves. How could someone so tiny possibly be cheating the system?

Tie him to a bed, they said. Strap down his bony legs and torn up arms, they said. Shove a tube down his throat and stop this cheating brat in his tracks, they did.

I was on 24 hour observation for 3 weeks. Weight up to 105 and holding.

I was drugged up to my eyeballs and thrown back into the communal area with everyone else, they would watch as my fat jiggled and my body bloated and my bones cracked under the pressure but I couldn’t bring myself to care because I could only breathe.

115, get out of here.

“Watch him, Mr Hummel; He’s picked up some new tricks.”

So I was back in the real world but I wasn’t better and Dad couldn’t bring himself to let me go back to school.

But he held it over me like it was an elusive goal.

“Get better and you can go back to school, just eat something and stop your nonsense and please go back to school.”

Sorry Dad, but I don’t actually want to go back there. They’d never let me use the gym again after the boxes and boxes of files they’d be given about me. They could flick through the pages and analyse the words and pick me apart. anorexia, self-harming behaviours, hints of EDNOS, anxiety and depression. Not to mention the vultures students, they would pull the skin from my corpse when I fell in the hallway again and again, they would hang me up on the cork board and everyone would know what I was and what I did and they would poke at my fat fat fat thighs as I hang there lifeless.

“Kurt, I have your pills,” Dad calls from the top of the stairs.

My group counsellor told her supervisor who told my shrink who told my Dad that I was losing again. 110 when I was weighed in on Wednesday, 106 now but who needs to know that was bad and badness can’t be allowed so Dad has to give me my crazy candy again and I’ll be numb.

If I want to fight back I can wait until tomorrow, when I have to meet with my shrink and she promises to ignore listen to my concerns.

He passes me two tiny blue pills and I swallow them dry, no water weight for me thank you. I open my mouth and wiggle my tongue so Dad can be sure I swallowed them, of course he doesn’t know the tricks I learnt at the hospital about tonguing my sleeping pills without the nurses noticing, but I decide to do it, keep them down just this once for him. Because I really do want him to think I’m trying.He mumbles in approval and his hand rests on my shoulder for a moment, there’s barely any flesh under his fingers, I know that, he knows that, it’s just skin and bone but I still feel like there is too much fat squeezing between his fingertips.

I think when he goes back upstairs he will cry, though we will both pretend he won’t.

When he’s gone I lie back on my bed, already feeling the numbness rising in my blood. I reach an arm out to the cabinet beside my bed and pull out a rolled up sock, inside is a tiny box and inside that is a shiny new razor blade, just pulled from its plastic casing.

I press it to the pale paper skin of my forearm, press down and just hold it there for a second. The point between pressure and pain, that second where my skin is so close to breaking and yet so eager to stay strong. I pull the blade down. The skin parts behind it and blood wells up, the cut isn’t deep, just wide enough for me to see the fat underneath.

I’m always surprised by how little it hurts. Paper cuts from my childhood were like tiny tears in my very being and I used to feel like they were the worst pain that could ever happen to me. Yet the deeper I go, the more of my insides I see…the less I feel.

I’m still numb, but the beautiful red proves I have blood in my body and the pulsing flow means I’m still human, I’m still here.

The blood slides down my arm, pooling below my wrist, holding its place in the gap where my flesh should be before dripping to the floor.

I’ll clean up later, for now I just wait.