I search for patterns in everything, in numbers, lists, initials, letters, shapes, time. Any way to impose meaning on the arbitrary events that shape my life. And some times I see the pattern leading me through the chaos. I got back from holiday with a close friend, just me and her and our suitcases in a beautiful foreign city. I felt free for the first time in months, away from the memories of failure and a summer totally saturated in apathy. I thought maybe I was really free. I ate without the numbers, the guilt, the fear, the planning, the purge. It was beautiful. Total sober silence. It always seems the kindest people I know unleash the demons inside me, the ones who try to destroy everything I've built. Or maybe being around these people just lets me be myself. I haven't made up my mind yet. We had been off the plane for about 12 hours before I noticed that she was deliberately skipping meals, insisting we walked everywhere, the way she scrutinised every packet and how she couldn't resist reading every menu we passed out loud before insisting she was still full from the raisins she'd eaten four hours before. And I saw what I used to be. Yet, what disturbed me most was the smugness I felt. She was thin but not skinny. And clueless. She'd starve herself and then eat ridiculous high calorie, low vitamin shit. She told me about her diet and how all she wanted to be was thin and I smiled and told her she looked gorgeous. I didn't tell her the breakfast bars she munched were a waste of calories, that her hatred of fruit and vegetables was a joke and that she'd never be really thin. Not the way I know I can be. I felt so arrogant - enriched, empowered by my knowledge, by the blogs I read, by the weight goals I achieved back in the 'bad old days'. And I knew then and there that I couldn't be normal.
I want to scream - I was getting better - and she ruined everything. Or maybe she just reminded me what I'm meant to do. The patterns I'm meant to fulfill.
