Last week, I was frustrated because some girl was spreading rumours about me and this week… It’s just gone. I don’t care about that, about her, any more at all whatsoever and I wish I did. What stopped me right in my tracks on Monday, and again today, was some awful news. In the space of a few short days, I have lost two dear family friends. Every time I get news of this nature, it seems to bring me right back to the beginning and parade me through all of the people I have lost in my life. It’s a terrible feeling, not being able to count them on one hand any more. But what gets me the most, is that two-thirds of the people who have left my life have done it of their own accord. And I haven’t been far off following suit over the past few years.

I remember one day, I was in my friend’s house after school. She was inside having lunch while myself , another friend of mine, and her dad, made kites out of plastic bags. I remember her dad’s hands teaching my clumsy primary-school digits how to tie the strings to each other. he taught us a lot, that man. And my other friend always made better kites than me, but never teased me for it in the way that little boys do. They both killed themselves within a year of each other. I am the only person who remembers that afternoon in this world. And it’s a lonely feeling.

Cancer happens. It happens to everybody and it is awful. But somehow I find a loss easier to accept knowing that he has been sick for a long time, knowing that it was nobody’s decision and not wondering if there was anything I could have done. It’s easier to accept if you don’t have to ask why. Cancer happens. And it is devastating. But it makes more sense.

About a year ago, I was preparing for big exams. I was nervous and wiry, and taking many supplements to keep myself on-track. Vitamins, minerals, antidepressants, sleeping pills – if it was made to keep me in control, I needed it. I needed so much control over my body. My beautiful body. My tiny, fragile body. My weight. My weight. My weight. I was seven stone and needed to be lighter to get away from it all, to control myself. I had a perverse obsession and felt so empowered by it. I got through that period with my body and mind intact. It was so difficult, but I ate and ate and ate until I seemed morbidly obese at eight stone. And then, I climbed out of that thinking. It took a long time. This week I got the news that a friend of mine has permanently injured her brain and is now living in assisted living – due to anorexia and abuse of diet pills. The same friend I had made fun of last time I saw her for being obsessed with her image, taking a full hour to do her make up before going to the shops, had taken herself away because of her obsession. Not on purpose, no. But  she had done it all the same. It’s hard to grasp that somebody is gone forever when they are still alive and physically on this earth. Somebody I know is not herself any more and I don’t don’t don’t know how to approach this. This was part tragic accident and part mental illness and I don’t know which part scares me more.

But I do know that I am very, very scared. Thinking about my accident ghosts and my cancer ghosts and my on-purpose ghosts and my alive-without-a-purpose friend who doesn’t know who she is, who I am, who can’t go back to college, who is in her early twenties and is still alive and gone away forever at the same time she can’t put on her make up it scares me.

And when this happens I sit in the shower and think about it. I can’t help but want some crazy bitch to come storming into my life and hand me some fluffy teenage drama that I can get buried in and run up the phone bill with. I need some gossip and I hate myself for trying to run away. So I marinate in my ghosts in the shower and think about which memories are now mine and mine alone. I think about the timing of these things and it’s always so much more cathartic to die in winter. I don’t know what I’m doing.

I can’t get over her. She does not know who she is. And I can’t call her dead because she’s not. How do you grieve for that?

• The Bell Jar [X] {X}
  
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower [X] {X}
  
• On the Road [X] {X}
  
• Slaughterhouse 5 [ ] {X}
  
• Catcher in the Rye [X] {X}
  
• The Virgin Suicides [ ] {X}
  
• Middlesex [ ] { }
  
• Virginia Woolf [ ] { }
  
• Girlfriend in a Coma [ ] {X}
  
• The Bloody Chamber [ ] { }
  
• Handmaid’s Tale [ ] {X}
  
• The Yellow Wallpaper [X] { }
  
• The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear [X] { }
  
• Catch 22 [ ] { }
  
• Fight Club [ ] { }
  
• Naked Lunch [ ] { }
  
• Dance of Dragons [ ] { }
  
• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake [ ] { }
  
• Tom Sawyer [ ] { }
  
• Steig Larsson trilogy [ ] {X}
  
• Suite Francaise [ ] { }
  
• The Life of Pi [X] { }
  
• Hallucinating Foucault [ ] { }
  
• Umberto Eco (Anything by)  [ ] { }
  
• Possession [ ] { }
  
• The Poisonwood Bible [ ] { }
  
• The Kindly Ones [ ] { }
  
• Regeneration [ ] {X}
  
• What I Loved [ ] {X}
  
• The Outsiders [X] { }
  
• To Kill a Mockingbird [X] { }
  
• Stephen King (Anything by) [ ] { }
• Girl, Interrupted [ ] { }
  
• A Town Called Alice (Ciara approved) [ ]  { }
  
• Cloud Atlas [ ] { }
• Haruki Murakami (Anything by) [ ] {X}
  
• Knowledge of Angels [ ] { }
• Animal Farm [ ] { }
  
• Kerouac (Anything by that is NOT On the Road) [ ] { }
  
• Chronicles of Narnia (Block God out of story) [ ] { }
  
• DO NOT READ ‘GRACE WILLIAMS SAYS IT LOUD’  (Unless you’re like Aisling and already have. You’ve been warned.) [:(] {X}
  
• Shutter Island [ ] { }
  
• Baby Zero [X] { }
  
• Beatrice and Virgil [ ] { }
  
• Eating Animals [ ] { }
  

Hop to it, men. We’ll be learned scholars in no time!

1. Imply that I don’t know what I am talking about, when clearly and truly I do.
2. Tell me that I am not good enough for something, disappointing you in some way. I just fly off the handle.
3. Imply that I think I am better than you. Don’t even.
4. Tell me that things are not bad for me, that I have it easy. Sometimes yes this is the case. However. I, and not you, will know when times are hard in my life, my life, and when I am finding it difficult to climb the stairs to my locker. When I can’t stay awake for more than 2 hours at a time and when I forget what I’m saying in the middle of a three word sentence, it’s a tough kind of day. Yeah, times are hard on these kind of days. For me. And I am the one in here.

Some people can just push my buttons like this. More often than not, I suppose. Could be my blood, and what’s missing from it. Or it could be all the shit I shove in there to make up for what I lack.

Just be decent, people. Be decent people.

While this is going on, all I hear is the piano outro, from that song Motorway To Roswell.
He tried hard, but he could not make it.

“Thanks, mam. But if my life was any kind of mobile? It would be the batmobile for sure.”

I’m such a fucking winner.

‘Is that your natural bite?’ I asked, holding his head in my hands.
‘Yeah… Why?
Ais?
What is it?’
As I broke into glass spider, almost human real tears. That is what it did to me. Shamefully.
‘Nothing. It’s beautiful. Gorgeous teeth, have you. What an attractive man! You’re a handsome devil. What’s your name?‘ Embarrassed.Cover my tracks with the words of John Cusack. Good tactics. Clever girl. Smooth moves, Ais. Well done, you case study.
Years now I’ve been taking the same fucking X-rays every few months, ‘bite down on this’, ‘put these in your ears’, ‘sit in this chair and look at the tube’. The med students then scurry away from me like I’m a leper. I know they’re just trying to protect themselves from harmful radiation, but still. Such beaguchtanas. And it ain’t the lead vests that do it. Fuck these complications, the saws, the wires. I need this. The reason I know that they’re med students is because they always have been. They need to see this. ‘Textbook’, ‘classic’, ‘good example’, ‘obvious’ all bandied about. Good for them to get their hands on a patient this deformed, you know? How lucky they are. How excited the surgeons seem. How shocked they always are on first examination to find that snap-crackle-pop – Heavens! My patient is not a young girl, in reality, but a bowl of rice krispies! I’m actually rather surprised that I’ve never had a nickname to do with all of that noise I make, really. How wonderful it would be to be one of the uplifting people, a patient who makes light, cracks jokes about the unfortunate unpleasant situations they get stuck with. Cracks. That word alone makes my blood boil. Why couldn’t it just go away, go away quickly, retreat efficiently?
Anything at the eyes or higher is just peachy, but as I’m sure most teenage girls do, I’m going to come out and say that I hate my face. But it’s more than that:
I hate what it’s done to me. I hate that people are grossed out by what it does, I hate that it hurts to yawn and shout and even eat sometimes, and that is hurts even more to look in the mirror at this. I need to change. This needs to go away. Deformed.

So, this leads me to my point about not being an extreme case at all. I have this secret, that is, apparently, serious. It does, apparently, have a name. One person knows. My parents are suspicious, on the cusp of finding out. This is, apparently, dangerous. I never really though so. Such an ugly word… You never think that it will happen to you, but when all evidence is weighed up, too obvious?, I digress, and put in front of you like that, it makes sense. It explains so much. Yet, despite everything coming together for me with this shock, this realisation… I can’t shake the feeling that it anyone knew but the one who does, things would change. They’d judge me, even though it’s been so obvious, right in front of people all along. For such a time now. There would be so much pressure on me to fix the situation I am in, for me to leave this behind and get better. But strangely, this particular circumstance I have found myself in is what keeps me going. Even I don’t understand what this is, or how it works. How it happened. ”’Nspiring, ”’nspiring, ”’nspiring. Maybe I could be. Just another short while to go til we find out. Short in leaving cert time. Anything is. I want to tell people, but I want to achieve this goal. It’s important for me to be able to do this by myself, even though I’ll get no reward from others. No congratulations. Just a fear. They’ll think I’m crazy. They’ll try to stop me.
But I will not be deterred.
This is right in front of all the people I know and love, and none but one will ever really see.
My plan is foolproof, see, because it is not extreme. Barely a case at all.

Often, my face upsets me. I to distraught easy over it on a day when I’m cracked and swollen and sore and it won’t settle. But I am an attractive girl, really I am. When I get this upset, I think about that fact. About debs, about my little black dresses and colorful tights. Without my figure, these legs, this stomach, I don’t really feel like I’m worth much of anything. I do think sometimes (And this is bold to say, but true for me. I don’t judge anyone else on their weight. Just her. As in, me.) that if I were overweight, I would surely die.
Without my figure, I am nothing. I should get a corset.