In Principio

The realization was gradual, and then all at once — infiltrating the softness of your brain and spreading through the tender flesh of your body. You know how it started, but you don't know at all: the thought was there, and then that's all there was.

You remember lying on the grass at West Gate park, the sky thick with sakura. Your fingers were intertwined with hers, two parts of a whole, but how could that be when you're half a person? You dreamt of your fingers laced with Aoba's, of being an entity unto itself, but how are you to ever be your own when you don't know who you are, or how to be without her?

You flipped a coin once, the two of you. You were six, and Iza-nii was fifteen, and he told you that if you and Mairu were the same, there was no reason for one of you to exist in the world. You didn't understand what Iza-nii meant, not fully, but you flipped a coin and split traits with Mairu anyway, because that's what she wanted. You didn't speak much after that, but it was fine because Mairu had enough words for both of you.

It was fine until it wasn't.

In school you sit at your desk, and you don't speak. When the girls try to intimidate you, you don't jump on your desk and threaten to pour tacks down their throats like Mairu. You think of the pins scraping down their oesophaguses, and you take pleasure in the image because you hate them for what they've done to you. You think of your nails dragging across your skin and scratching down your throat, and it makes no sense because you hate them so much, but you need them to like you. You never do feel the rise of vomit in your throat, and sometimes you get so angry you pull your hair until your scalp is sore. It never quite satisfies when you know that your last mistake is still inside you, making your stomach swell and accumulating beneath your skin.

It suffocates you.

(In truth, you don't know how much you weigh, but you know that it's too much and you have to do something about it.)

You wear gym clothes to school. You're supposed to be the sporty one, but Mairu is better than you. She's better than you at everything. Your thighs are thicker than hers, and you run as fast as you can in cross country, but you never manage to beat her. Sometimes, Mairu slows down so that you finish the race together, but it makes you hate yourself even more when she drops her standards for your benefit.

(But still, she can never be as low as you).

At Taekwondo, Eijirou tells Mairu that she's good enough to start training with the team. She could fight as a lightweight competitor in the regional championships, if that's what she wanted.

He doesn't look at you.

You think of Mairu fighting the girls at school, and the pepper spray in your bag, and you wonder if you'd have a place on the team too, if only you were lighter.

That evening, you take Mairu's school skirt from the washing basket and into the bathroom with you. There's a safety pin in the waistband, but you can feel your flesh straining against the fabric even without it as you force it over your hips. You throw the skirt on the floor and jab the sharp end of the safety pin into your stomach, and you scratch and scratch until the blood dripping on the floor looks foreign to you, and you can barely associate the sting ripping through your stomach with what you see before you.

You start skipping breakfast in the morning, and you go to cross country practise at lunch time. Mairu's in a different class, and you reason that the teachers probably made it that way so that it's easier to tell you apart. You think that the teachers must be stupid if they can't tell the difference between you, but another part of you wonders if your efforts at transformation are to be more like Mairu, or somebody else entirely.

You stop paying attention in class, and it's not because you don't want to. It's as if all your mind has space to process are thoughts of food, or nothing at all. You skip lunch sometimes, but not nearly enough. It's easy to tell Mairu that you've already eaten when she takes almost twenty minutes to come and meet you, but you often give in to the urge to eat after cross country practise. You start to feel dizzy a lot, and even though it scares you, you're beginning to like the feeling.

It must mean that it's working.

In homeroom, you find out that your teacher has entered your class into a Young Enterprise competition. It isn't compulsory to take part, but you decide that you will if it gives you one more excuse to skip dinner. You've seen the way that Mairu looks at you when you pick at your food, and you don't know how to tell her that your past favourites are nothing more to you now than congealed fat. Nothing is appealing anymore, but at night your stomach cramps painfully with hunger, and you lie awake thinking of all the food you wish you could eat. You look across the room at Mairu sleeping, and you wonder how it is that you can simultaneously feel that you're invisible and occupying too much space.

Mairu looks angry when you tell her that you can't walk home with her anymore. She hasn't clicked on yet, of course, because she's Mairu, and you're quiet anyway, but you know that you've been quieter lately, and you start to wonder when she'll threaten you with tacks if you don't tell her what's going on. You feel nauseous when you see Mairu and Aoba walking home together, and you have an urge to shred your arms to ribbons for feeling jealous when you know that Aoba deserves better than you, and so does Mairu.

On the days that you don't have Young Enterprise, you start to go for walks. Your times haven't improved in cross country since the end of June, and Mairu tells you that it isn't safe to go for walks on your own in the evening, so you start to make excuses to leave the apartment. She looks hurt when you leave her, but you tell yourself that it's all for the greater good. You want to be someone that she can be proud of, you want to make the half a whole, and so you keep going even though your head hurts with it all and your stomach is writhing.

Sometimes you crack, and you end up eating cake from the cupboard when Mairu's gone to bed. It's not exactly bingeing given that it's a slice or two, but it's enough to decide that your calorie allowance has to be zero for the next two days, and it's even harder to hide it when you're not eating at all.

ふわっと

Your clothes don't fit you anymore, and in September the girls at school change their minds and start to compliment you on how slim you've become. You smile, but you don't mean it, and you don't tell them that it hurts to exist and you don't know what to do. Interacting with anybody is difficult now, and sometimes Mairu crawls into your bed at night and tells you that she loves you, but you can't bear the touch of her hands around your waist when you're sure that she's measuring herself against you.

You stop going to cross country, eventually. Your coach pulls you aside on a Friday evening and tells you that you've lost an 'awful lot of weight'. She asks if you're okay. You smile and nod, and that's the end of it, but it's starting to feel like it's too much, everything is, and you find yourself looking up morbid stories of suicide on the web. In an unlucky twist of fate, you find a website devoted entirely to pictures of emaciated girls, and it makes you feel sick and afraid, but part of you wants to be like that, and that scares you the most. You don't know what's wrong with you, and you desperately want to scream because you can't ask for help when they'll make you stop — not when you're not sure that you can anymore. Besides, there's nothing wrong because you're not thin enough to have a problem. You're nothing like the girls on the website.

Lontano

You don't miss your parents. They've never really been there, but you wonder if things would have reached this point if their input to your life was more than a bi-monthly visit and a thrice weekly Skype conversation.

You miss Iza-nii. He's awkward and terrible, but you need him because you don't know how much longer you can take the tension with Mairu. You feel flat most of the time, but sometimes you find yourself crying because you know that you're hurting Mairu and you don't know how to stop. Young Enterprise finished in July, but you still manage to escape dinner because Mairu is spending more and more time with Aoba. The idea of them having fun without you is equivalent to somebody tugging at your insides, but you remember the clawing feeling of claustrophobia, squeezing all of the joy from you until you're terrible company, and you think that they're probably better off without you ruining it for them.

One night, Mairu demands to see how much weight you've lost, and when you won't show her she grabs the hem of your top and pulls it up. Your stomach is riddled with wide pink and white scars, and cuts in various states of healing, and when Mairu sees them her face cracks and she storms out of the room. You hear her talking to Iza-nii on the phone, and you have a horrible twisting sensation in your stomach where you know that you need to cry but you can't.

You stare at the ceiling and wait until it's over.

(You're subsisting on half a slice of bread a day, and your hands shake as you raise it to your mouth because it's too much. Even as you eat it you're afraid of it, of what it'll do to you, and you do everything you can to avoid situations where you'll have to eat.)

Iza-nii brings Russia Sushi over the next day, and he tells Mairu that she should be supportive that 'Kururi's trying to get fitter', but you can see the concern in his eyes when he leaves. He calls you later that evening, having made a doctor's appointment for you tomorrow because you 'haven't been feeling well recently.'

The doctor's surgery smells like Calpol and antiseptic. He weighs you and takes your height and blood pressure, sticks a thermometer in your ear and presses on your fingernails. He asks Iza-nii lots of the questions, but how could Iza-nii possibly know anything when he's not there (and who is he to talk when he's a beansprout anyway?), but he seems to know rather a lot, and you wonder if he's been in contact with Mikage or your cross country coach.

You leave the doctor's surgery with a referral to counselling and a diagnosis of Anorexia Nervosa. You can't laugh at how ridiculous it is — you haven't laughed for months, and Iza-nii hovers for slightly longer than usual when you reach the door of your apartment. He pats your hair awkwardly and mumbles something about your parents, but you're too tired to register his words as a coherent sentence.

You curl in your customary place beneath the kotatsu when you get inside, and all you can think is that the doctor is wrong.

You're too fat to be anorexic.