Words by MB
Art by Caitlin Graham
CONTENT WARNING: discussions of eating disorders, mental illness, body image.
I’m leaving.
Letting you go terrifies me. For so long you supplied an illusion of security and success. You promised me that by holding on, eternally being hand-locked lovers, we could forever achieve great things. Together I could usurp power and control over a destiny to eternal eminence.
It was euphoric; always being on the brink of excellence. The edge with you was my ecstasy.
But there was never an end. There was no eventual free-fall; no leap beyond the perimeter of your control. The climax promised never came. I was left with only persistent spiralling. Trapped and stagnant in a stasis of ignorant instability.
While I now feel the nausea of your prowess, leaving still feels like loss. It feels like breaking. Giving up a craved certainty you’ve made me carnivorous for.
I’ll be scared and confused as I am reborn into the dark. Without you, I’ll be on my knees, cold and blind, in a never-ending, desperate attempt to piece together segments of myself I can no longer see.
You’ll tell me it’s too risky to leave you. You’ll remind me of the vigour of our intertwining dependence on one another. An envied power couple we are. I’m only wasting my time looking for lost parts.
I no longer identify with them, you’ll say.
I no longer need them to make me whole, you’ll assure.
But now I see you are wrong. The charade of my completeness with you leaves me in a blackness more ominous than this foreign dark. The safety I felt embraced in your arms has transmuted into a suffocating strangle.
You will try to warn me of the hazards of escaping your caress, but now your touch is rough. Any fears you instil have become eclipsed by a vision of my tethered freedom.
You have taken my autonomy. Your rules of restriction and deprivation now tire me, not empower me. They fail as dependable protectors from a capricious world, and look a lot more like untrusting guards before a locked door to abiding liberation.
Staying keeps me a hostage from that life beyond.
I do not know if I will want such a life. But the falsity of your comforts are now more unwelcome than any uncertainty wreathing in my mind. With you, life is not as exciting as you made me believe. Life has metamorphosed into perpetual bore as I fumble around recouping from your lies; in a constant grapple to survive.
Now I know surviving and living are not the same.
While it scares me to transgress the existence of cautious survival you supplied; the accompanying numbness no longer serves my peace.
I am starving. My famine has become more fearful. Gorging on emancipation from you is a reclaiming of living.
I’m leaving.
