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Last April, my boyfriend of 2 years and I called it quits. I’m lying actually, HE called it quits and I moved out a month later. I don’t care about the details anymore, they are not significant. The only triumph I hold from that warm April night was that the world did not end for me, even after being so sure it would have if anything ever happened to our relationship.
I won’t say I particularly thrived in the following months. My ex seemed insanely regrettable and sad and I was not yet open-minded enough to understand why. Looking back, I know he was truly routing for our relationship to prevail at some point. He missed dearly a girl he had fallen recklessly in love with, a girl I could not be for him in the domestic, calm lifestyle we created with each other.
For a while thereafter, I spiraled endlessly down a rabbit hole of mania and substance abuse. I stayed out late, went to bars almost every night of the week, lost 20 pounds and flaunted a new, bold, and often crass personality filled with self-sexualization in the form of jokes and relentless sarcasm. I worked around a warehouse filled with men that shamelessly stared at my chest, my legs, and what was left of an ass that I had all but starved away.
Still, my true conversative sexual nature was not to be challenged, and I opted for appearing promiscuous rather than actually sleeping my way through Baltimore. This quickly earned me the reputation of “tease,” and despite the whispers and rumours that went flying around in and outside of work, I was not bothered by the attention, rather, fascinated by it. My mood disorder made the inflated self-esteem real, but it was still only a layer — superficial and external, sitting on top of my skin trying desperately to sink through the epidermis like some cheap dollar store lotion. It never actually worked.
I remained a broken, intoxicated, train wreck of a human for months to come, indulging in self-sabatoge like an expensive chocolate bar. I romanticized my self-harm. I wrote poetry about it. I started throwing up all of my meals because being thin felt so good, it was worth the tears in my esophagus. I had found a way to punish myself for all of the disgusting habits I had by creating new ones. I dismantled my body from the inside out, until a severe infection and a…
