Skin And Bones; Harry Styles

(Note: This story is written in two parts. While they may be read as one continuous narrative, they also suffice on their own as two different stories.)

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The door clicks shut. The water starts to run. Silence fills the space in the room, as he leans over the toilet bowl.

A long pause.

The sound of water running in all four taps feels so far away, as he stares down at the endless length down the bowl, the circular prison that has shackled him for so many months.

He knows what’s to come, and he hates it. But there’s no way that he can stop it, because soon he’s pushing two fingers to the back of his mouth, eyes brimming with tears as his throat gags and his dinner comes gushing out.

The pain inside him continues for twenty minutes until the last of his meal is swirling in the bowl, mixed with splashes of blood. Harry straightens up again, staring down at the contents in the bowl, before flushing it and watching it disappear forever, as he regains a sense of control over his own body again.

Perfection.

The one word sends chills down his spine, shatters the courage inside him. He wants to be strong enough to let go, to crave something other than perfection, a flawed idea that ends up somehow interlacing with the numbers on the scale, the inches of his body falling.

He stands up and faces the mirror, bracing himself for the disgust that will overwhelm him like a tsunami. The image of the reflection sends him reeling, he’s never seen anything so repulsive as the face, the body that is staring back at him. It makes him feel so worthless, so angry and frustrated that he’s going to have to spend every single day for the rest of his fucking life trapped in this hideously imperfect skin, that he’s never going to be able to change.

It’s an addiction, to watch the size of his own body shrink so greatly, to the extent that nobody even recognizes him anymore. An addiction to watch the numbers on the scale fall, lower and lower. An addiction to obsess over calories and pounds every single moment of the day. An addiction to forget how to be normal, even.

He stares at the reflection, looking at every flaw, picking it apart until the pieces of self-loathing are scattered on the floor. His reflection whispers nasty comments back at him, insinuating a total surge of sadness that fills every nerve in his body, and he feels like he’s ready to explode but he can’t.

He’s always been too complete.

One by one, he’s shedding off the things he once knew. His body, his mental stability, his hold on reality, his strength, his courage, his self-esteem, everything that has once seemed so clear, no blurred by the lines of the disease, the voice which controls him.

—

It started as a promise. Harry wanted nothing but to be perfect, good enough for himself. Now every single action he does is an order that the voice gives him, that he carries out to please the voice. He can never run, even though sometimes he really does try, to run away as far as possible from the voice, spending hours on the treadmill until he collapses on the floor in a puddle of tears and sweat.

He really hates the voice sometimes, hates how it taunts him when he tries to stand up to it. He hates how it makes him say horrible cold things to his friends and push them away. He hates how the voice constantly reminds that he’s not good enough, that he’ll never be good enough.

But at the end of the day, he always collapses in the arms of the voice, trembling and sobbing because he’s such a failure, because he’s so worthless and be just wants to give up. And the voice listens, it’s there to soothe him and calm him, tell him that it’s okay because he can just try again tomorrow. The voice promises that they can get through this together, that it will be there for him, that it will make him skinny and perfect one day.