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I come home from school. It's been two months since that fateful day when my mother took me to my room and told me what I would have to do. It's been two months, and I have felt myself getting weaker and weaker and weaker. I don't know how I'll be able to hold on these many long months. I don't know how I'll be able to live through it. But I have to live through it. And so I force myself on.

I get to my room, being followed by my mother.

"How was school today?" she asks me with concern dripping through her voice. She loves me. Even now, when she's been forced to make such a horrible decision, she loves me. Yet why can I not make myself believe this?

"It was okay," I reply, exhaustion dripping through my voice. School wasn't actually okay. I was so, so hungry the whole time. As I always am.

"That's good." She closes the door, and I hear the telltale click of the lock.

I've mostly been locked in my room these past two months. It makes sense. I understand that I probably wouldn't be able to stop myself from going to the fridge if I could, so locking the door just ensures that I can't do that. It just ensures that I can't steal food.

I miss being able to interact with my family. I miss it so, so very much. I didn't know that I would miss it so much. I'm all alone now. There's no-one with me. No-one to share my time with. No-one to share my experiences with. No-one to listen to and talk to and interact with. Just me, alone with my thoughts in my own room in a house that doesn't feel like it's mine, that has never felt like it was mine.

Hunger claws in my gut like a vicious, hungry beast with sharp teeth and sharp claws. It bites and scratches at all my insides. My stomach hurts so much, my ribs hurt so much, my chest cavity hurts so much. My arms and legs hurt. My head feels light and dizzy. It all hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts. It hurts unbearably and I feel like screaming in pain yet I am far too weak to scream. Not that it would make much of a difference anyways. All that would happen is that I would get in trouble.

I'm helpless. I'm helpless. I'm locked in this room and I'm helpless and I can't get out. I'm trapped. I'm trapped and there's nothing I can do. All I can do is claw desperately at my mind for an escape, for a release, for a relief and a salvation that I know is not coming. The beast inside of me and me myself are both trapped, are both hungering, are both begging to be let out. But the beast in me can eat my insides. I cannot.

Though actually, I am eating myself. My body has run out of fat to digest into carbohydrates, probably. It's probably digesting my muscles and my organs and my epithelial tissue now. Burning through my cells to extract precious, precious energy. A process which has been evolved into my bloodline over millions of years.

See, it's natural, what is happening to me. My hunger is natural. It is something that my body is ready for. Something that my body has been ready for for so many years. The biological processes that guide starvation are processes that have existed for eons. They are processes that have been building and developing within us since we were just single cells, since we were just prokaryotes. So, it's okay to starve sometimes. There is nothing wrong with starving sometimes.

And anyways, because I'm starving, that means that my mother and my sisters can eat. My sisters, especially, can eat. They need to be able to eat. They need to be able to get the calories they need. I love them. I really do love them a lot. And I need to do what I can do in order to help them. If that means not eating, then so be it. I will bear it, no matter what it takes from me, no matter how much it hurts.

But part of me doesn't love my family. Part of me holds it against them, what they are doing to me. Part of me is deeply, deeply betrayed. It is rueful, jealous, bitter. I am rueful, jealous, bitter. I am full of hatred and bitterness and part of me wants to get revenge, get revenge, get revenge for what they've put me through.

But I cannot get revenge. I am simply one person with no money, no power, no property, no abilities, no resources, no support, no help. There is nothing I can do about my situation. I'm a teenaged girl locked in a room, all by myself. There is nothing I can do. Perhaps this is why my mother was able to do this to me. Because she knew I was weaker than her. She knew I couldn't fight back.

But I feel so guilty for hating my family. I feel so guilty for wanting revenge. This simply proves that I am rotten inside. It simply proves that I am unholy, ungrateful, unworthy. I know that the good and right thing for me to do would be to be strong and silently bear the burden of my situation. But for some reason I am finding myself unable to do that. I am finding myself unable to do what I know is good and right. How on earth could I be so selfish? This just proves that I don't actually deserve to eat.

I lie in my bed, which is what I have found myself doing so very often, and I cry. I think about reading a book to try to take my mind away from the hunger. I think about it, but I know it won't work. I've tried reading before. I've tried thinking other thoughts and getting my mind off of the hunger. Nothing has worked. All the time, my emotions are consumed by the all-consuming ache of hunger. Even when my mind is distracted, it doesn't matter that my mind is distracted because my heart isn't.

It's all-consuming. It consumes every part of me, taking more and more and more until there is nothing left. All I am is a constant, insatiable need, an overarching and overwhelming ache. I am burning, burning, burning. Every part of me is burning. And yet at the same time I am freezing, freezing, freezing. Every part of me is freezing. The pain is a screaming sort of pain, and I cannot bear it, I cannot bear it, I cannot bear it. But bear it I must.

And, throughout this whole time, my emotional misery has not subsided. I'm still as sad as I was before. As torn and ripped and poisoned. The poison is still seeping through me. And my mind and my heart are swept away in the poison storm. Except now, along with the emotional pain, there is also physical pain. There is physical pain that is just as strong as the emotional pain and the two types of pain are interlaced throughout each other. As two sides of the same coin.

I breathe. And the breath comes ragged and jagged. Everything inside me is ragged and jagged. Everything about me is ragged and jagged. It has been for a long, long while. As long as I can remember. But it's worse now.

Now the parts of my mind that I could suppress somewhat before are more bold and loud than they ever have been. They tell me that I am not loved, I am not loved, I am not loved. I know that I'm loved, that I must be loved. But the feeling that I am not overcomes me. The feeling that no one in the universe truly cares for me overcomes me and overwhelms me. And I try so very very hard to not listen to it. But there is nothing that I can do but for listening to it. Despite all my best efforts. But still, I tell myself that I am wrong, I am wrong, I am wrong. I tell myself that I am loved. Now if only I could believe myself.

The hunger was terrible the first day. The first day when I had no food. When I had only one meal that day. The first day I starved. It was so terrible, so painful, so unbearable. It was such violence. Violence on my body, violence on my mind, violence on my heart, violence on my soul. There was so much violence and there was so much devastation. I did not think it could possibly get worse.

But get worse it did. Every day that I went without food, the pain built up and built up and built up. It was more unbearable each day. And each day all I could do was bear it. And each day I was pushed further and further and further past the limits of what my body could tolerate. Each day I was pushed further past the limits of what I though myself capable of tolerating.

It was and still is a small kindness that I was used to unbearable pain my whole life, despite that pain being not quite as physical. It was still physical. My past emotional pain, the pain that I've been dealing with my whole life, it still had a physical aspect to it. It just wasn't as ingrainedly physical as this hunger. Though of course the hunger affects my heart and my mind as well. Sadness and hunger are both deeply physical, they are both deeply emotional, they are both deeply unbearable.

I went to school each day and nobody noticed. Nobody notices what I'm going through. I'm always quiet. I'm always subdued. So my exhaustion is not really noticed. In a way I was always exhausted anyways. A couple of teachers asked me why I had lost so much weight. I guess they noticed. I simply told them that I wasn't as hungry as I used to be. A bold faced lie. But one they believed. They didn't pursue it any further. They simply let me be. So I ate my lunch at school and I went back home and got locked in my room.

Which is where I am now, lying in my soft bed, crying.

I think about screaming, yelling, banging against the door, begging for help and food and attention. But I know that it will be pointless. I know that no help will come. It will just be a waste of energy. And I have no energy to waste. I think about what could happen if I tried to fight my mother, if I tried to run to the fridge and get food before she could lock me in my room. I know that that would be pointless as well. In my weakened state, she is much stronger than me. And I couldn't fight my mother and my sisters at the same time anyways. There is nothing I can do about my situation. There is literally nothing that I can do.

Not that I should struggle. Not that I should fight. My mother sacrificed so much to take care of me. She gave so much to take care of me. I owe it to her to sacrifice for her back. I know this. I know this, and I tell myself this, again and again and again. But it doesn't stop the pain. Actually, it just makes the pain so much worse. It makes all the pain so much worse in all its aspects. I tell myself that I shouldn't struggle against this, but each and every day that I go hungry, the struggling and desperate part of my mind gets louder and louder, harder and harder to ignore.

I don't know what will happen when I can't ignore it any longer.