One More Try

Everything is new and simple still. Maybe I can truly try again. I smile and I giggle and I make fun, but no one here knows me truly, at least not yet. Nobody knows me truly except for me, and I can be in the driver's seat. I can make choices for me, I can try for control.

My room is so small that when I push back my creaky wooden desk chair all of my floor space vanishes. My walls are painted the kind blue of toddler's rooms, and it glows gold with the bulb of my wicker lamp. The shades won't shut, but all I can see through the window is a shiny black you only get out of the city. Maybe you can see the glow of my window on the quad below.

My belly is full with starches and bad-for-you carbs. It is hard to socialize without food in this first week, but I promise that tomorrow will be my last day eating normal and hating myself for it. Today I had a cafeteria-bad quesadilla loaded with cooked vegetables and processed cheese. I ate with a pair of over-zealous liberal arts students, eagerly declaring how "different" and "open" our campus is without saying anything substantial. Sometimes they were embarrassingly loud. As much as I would like to spend all day holed up in my room watching documentary films, I truly crave any sort of human affection. I need to be reminded that I am liked, maybe just to remind myself that the thoughts inside my head aren't all true.

I begin in September. Forty pounds, two months. It is crazy, but maybe not impossible. Maybe not impossible if I truly try.