Relapses and Reflections

I look in the mirror and back at old photos A fat little girl looks at me with immense happiness But when I look in the mirror, I see a different girl One with sunken, empty eyes Redness surrounding them from hidden tears And to think that these two girls are the same person Freshman year was the year of curling up next to a toilet bowl at two a.m. Learning to puke and gag quietly, as to not wake my family Going to school in baggy clothes and avoiding everyone Who knew that when I ditched my middle school self, I would also ditch fifty pounds in two months My year put into music would be the ballad of muffled sobs and fake smiles I saw bulimia as something to help Seeing how glorified and joked about it was on movies and shows I watched With the "ideal body" chiseled into my brain, I set off on an addictive path that I could not stray from By the end of twenty-nineteen, I had been hitting 4 months of recovery By the spring of twenty twenty, I recognized how easy relapsing is It's crazy how much a bathroom scale means to you when you become a mindless zombie controlled by an eating disorder Nobody sees my body and thinks that I'm bulimic Why is there a stigma that only thin people can have eating disorders? Both my mind and teeth have been rotted by this disorder I wish I was young again to make this go away I look at the old pictures of me She was beautiful, so why did she need to change? So when my parents ask me where their "happy little girl" went, I look back at the pictures I don't know, mom She left along with gallons of half chewed food and endless nights of sobbing