Maybe i am more then a number (Mi)

Maybe I am more than a number

I let my eyes flicker over the wall for a few seconds and tried to take in all of the names. It would have been impossible to remember them all and I didn’t want to remember just a few how could I have chosen which on was worth reading, what messages should I have taken on board out of all of them. They all had something to say, a story to tell but even the wall was monitored. The paint work was patchy were inappropriate things that had been written where painted over. I could still read the words welcome to hell and abandon all hope all those who enter here under a particularly bad patch job.  Bad feelings were not tolerated on the recovery wall.

Dragging my eyes away from the wall I turned my back on it and stood in front of the mirror and dropped my dressing gown and pyjama bottoms before pulling my top up and over my head so I could examine my body for its many flaws. It looked different these days and of course in reality it was. I had gained the weight they asked and the charts congratulated me for a normal body weight and a healthy BMI. I still saw the fat I still hated my tummy but somewhere inside it seemed a little bit less important now. I wanted to be thin but I never seemed to get there even at seventy five pounds I had not seen thin and if I did see the bones in the mirror I pushed them aside and saw the fat around them.

 At seventy five pounds I had been dying. I felt constantly awful but because I lived with it I assumed that everyone always felt the constant pain. That everyone’s joints where as stiff as mine, that everyone around me struggled to get the heart to pump blood around their body. Now I understood it was my body protesting. For so long I had allowed my body to become the whole of me but now I was gradually learning it was not the entire sum of who I was. I did not like my body. I doubt that I ever would be thrilled with what I saw when I looked at the shiny reflection in a mirror and for a long time I would freak when I gained a pound and sometimes even soup would be too much to bare, however I was learning slowly that I was so much more than the body that I walked around in and that the people who loved you- and Emmet and Esmee did love me even if I could really understand it- never really saw what was on the outside any way it was what lied beyond that shell, it was the spirit that they saw. To them you would always look like a super model. It was learning to see that in you that was the hard bit.