A short and rather sad depiction of an eating disorder

Approval has never been something she desired from anybody but her own self.

She simply lies on the bench, bordering the sidewalk. Once in a while, she fills her lungs with acidic smoke from the cigarette between her fingers. She doesn't mind disease. She doesn't fear death.

Sharp pains taunt her legs and spine as she shifts her position. Skeletal. Suffering.

Some call it a disease, she calls it a blessing.

She ascends from the bench and looks down at the sidewalk. Ashes from her cigarette scatter at her feet. Absentmindedly, she watches the thin staff of smoke rise from the end of her Marlboro. Thin.

Walking has now become an addiction, but a chore still. The more she begins to crave the activity, the weaker she finds herself. She pays close attention to how she places her feet. She pays close attention to her own legs. What would she do if they were to meet? All would be for nothing.

A child with her own mother watches the girl stumble along, cigarette in teeth. The child looks down at her own legs. She and the girl look so different.

Not perfection. Not obsession. Control. Just control.

But this lie she tells herself has frayed to a ghost of any meaning that it once held. She knows the blessing she's been so terrifyingly inflicted with. She knows this blessing. She knows this disease.

Once again, she sits down on a nearby bench. Her bones splinter her skin. The scent of grilled meat floats near her delicately angled face. Her hand flies up to her mouth and nose.

It will all be for nothing. 

Looking down at her skeletal torso, down to her sharp hip bones, slowly caressing her tiny legs with her eyes. Constantly, she did this. The lingering scent of a food cart makes her sick to her pea-sized stomach. It doesn't need to be any bigger anyway.

Hesitantly, she rests her hand on her thigh. Anger and disappointment.

It is not small enough. I am not capable of beauty. 

Until she can cut her own skin with the sharpness of each bone she possesses, she will still be broken. Ah, and when the blessing breaks her, only then will she be satisfied.

I do not need to eat. I need to be thin.

She loves nobody, and nobody has ever told her to stop. Others have admitted to her, the state she's put herself in is horrific. To a normal human eye, she is no longer beautiful. But she will never care.

Approval has never been something she desired from anybody but her own self.