Page 3 of Face Off

It burned. My nose bled afterward, my heart hammered hard enough to frighten me, and I hated every second. I never tried it again.

That didn’t make the rest less reckless.

I had taken medication designed for bodies and conditions that weren’t mine. Laxatives when I had nothing in my stomach to begin with, combined things without caring what they might do to my heart because losing weight mattered more than staying safe. I treated dizziness like evidence of discipline and exhaustion like proof I was succeeding.

Bulimia had never been part of my disorder. The thought of eating enough to lose control terrified me, and the possibility that I might fail to purge every calorie made it unbearable. Pills, injections, stimulants, and starvation offered the illusion that nothing entered my body without permission and the false notion that I was in control.

At five feet three inches and one hundred one pounds, I still looked in the mirror and found too much of me. Treatment taught me that illness didn’t become less dangerous because I packaged it beautifully.

I left residential care at one hundred twenty-three pounds.

The number terrified me then. Some mornings it still could, though I no longer knew exactly what I weighed. I asked Aura and Bliss to become my outpatient support team, and they accepted without hesitation. They both inhaled every piece of information my treatment team provided about my disorders, warning signs, and recovery plan. They handled the numbers and monitored what needed attention while I focused on whether I ate breakfast before opening the boutique, finished lunch during a rush, and recognized hunger before it became nausea and shaking hands.

Tonight, I tracked the way the soup tasted.

Broccoli, sharp cheddar, garlic, cream, black pepper, and the tiny pinch of cayenne my mother insisted improved everything. I ate another spoonful. The fear didn’t vanish. It no longer received the final vote.

That was recovery most days. Nothing cinematic. No triumphant music or sudden love affair with every curve of my body. I heard the old voice, recognized it, and continued eating while it complained.

My body had softened over the last year, filling out my breasts, rounding my hips beneath jeans that once hung from them, and giving me a killer ass that almost made the fear worth arguing with. My thighs touched, my stomach curved when I sat, and my face belonged to a woman who slept, ate, laughed, and occasionally consumed cake without believing she needed to earn it first.

I didn’t love every inch of myself every day, but I no longer required hatred to feel safe.

After I finished the soup, I carried the bowl to the sink and cut into the small lemon cake. The first slice leaned sideways, frosting dragging beneath the knife in a thick yellow-white stripe.

I put it on a pink plate and added a candle.

One candle for one year.

One year since I left treatment. One year inside a life I built myself. One year of rent, inventory, therapy, theater costumes, coffee burns, Spanish lessons, mistakes, and days when getting out of bed felt less like survival and more like anticipation.

I lit the candle and leaned both hands against the counter. “You did good, Charm,” I said. My voice trembled and I let it. “You did really fucking good.”

The flame blurred for a moment before I blinked the tears away. They weren’t ashamed tears. They didn’t demand an apology or require someone to rescue me from them.

I made a wish, then I blew out the candle, carried the cake to my bed, and reached for the round floral hatbox on the floor beside my nightstand.

It wasn’t hidden. Nothing about the letters was secret except their existence.

My therapist suggested them during my second month in treatment when I admitted that half my thoughts still formed as conversations with Ryan. She said writing to someone who would never read the words could function like journaling. I could give grief somewhere to go without turning it into action.

At first, I wrote two or three letters a day.

I told him what breakfast they made me eat, which therapist I disliked, and how many times I nearly asked Bliss to find out whether he was happy. I apologized until the words became meaningless. I begged on paper because paper couldn’t feel responsible for saving me.

The letters changed as I did.

Eventually, I stopped writing only about losing him. I told him about the boutique, my first online sale, the customer who cried when I altered her mother’s wedding dress, and the costume director who believed three days constituted reasonable notice for twelve period gowns. I wrote about new books and poems. I told him when I found a writer whose words made me stop scrolling and read the same line until it hurt.

Before Ryan, I read because it was assigned and discussed poetry because grades required an opinion. Fashion was the only language I believed belonged to me because knowing one thing well felt safer than risking failure somewhere else.

He gave me Brontë, Tennyson, Lowell, and pieces of himself tucked between every line. He taught me that literature wasn’t a room full of dead people waiting to judge whether I understood them correctly. It was alive, furious, sexual, grieving, political, funny, and sometimes cruel. It allowed people separated by centuries to recognize the same ache.

Spanish became part of that expansion.

I started learning because he was proud of his first language and because every word sounded different in his mouth. I continued because the language was beautiful. Because learning another way to communicate felt like opening a door I hadn’t known existed.

Juanita taught Ryan English when he was a child because she wanted the world to have fewer doors it could close against him.