Dear Ana,

The Nervosa sisters

"Once upon a time there lived a happy little family, a mom a dad and their two adorable little daughters."
"You're seriously starting like that?"
Ana looked at her sister unamused.
"What? It's fun, I'm talking right now okay." She continued.

"Sadly the parents passed away when the two little girls turned six, but there was no one to take care of them."
"Rather no one WANTED to look after them."
"Stop interrupting Ana!"
Ana rolled her eyes, Mia continued once again.

"As I was saying, they lived alone. Dependent on each other.
However their aunt did take care of each them until they turned 12. After that they lived all alone in a pretty big house.
You could imagine that two little girls left alone would really fuck them up."
"It did."
The sisters looked at each other.
"They had no role models, no cooking experience, no house-hold experience. Nothing.
As they got older they learned a thing or two about handling things.
But at school, they were treated as outcasts. "Don't hang out with the Nervosa sisters."
Only having each other.
Always glued together, afraid to be alone.
At school they envied those popular girls. They were pretty and thin and everybody adored them.
The sisters decided to diet, they might become more popular if they lost some weight.
They supported each other; went for runs together and made healthy low calorie meals.
Ana, who was just a few minutes younger than her sister, stepped on her scale everyday. She thought it was going to slow, she wasn't actually losing weight and it would take forever."

Mia gave Ana a sad look, but she still continued talking.

"Ana was desperate. She thought eating less would be the key to faster weight loss. And she was right, she ate small bites and threw a lot of food away, sometimes she would even skipped meals. She lost a lot of weight."

Mia nodded to Ana, Ana continued the story:
"Her sister, Mia, noticed her fast weight loss and turned jealous. Her sister was leaving her behind. She wanted to do the same, but copying would be petty. She had to find her own way. Mia started out eating less.
However, Mia couldn't take it so well as Ana. She would have major cravings and would binge on all sorts of bad foods. One time, after she had eaten a lot of junk, she hated herself. She felt disgusted.

She felt desperate, it was going too slow. She should've lost more by now. She felt more hate towards food and decided to just eat less, that would help. So at every meal with her sister she ate small bites and skipped lunch a few times to go running or do something else. She wanted to empty her stomach.
She ran to the bathroom and without any further thought, she stuck 3 fingers down her throat and purged.
When she felt like everything was out, she felt embarrassed. A new low.
She wanted to find a different way to lose weight, but she kept coming back to the bathroom every time she ate."

Mia took over again:
"Ana found out about Mia's habit, they had a big fight."
But they could never hate each other, they were all they had.
Ana had made two bracelets, both of them made from beads strung together. They looked alike, one was red-beaded and the other blue-beaded.
Ana gave her Mia the blue beaded one.
She had said: 'Blue is for Mia. And Red is for Ana.'

Mia had understood this was their way of accepting each other's habit and conserving their strong sisterly-bond.
All they ever wanted was to be thin, they always had each other.
Still they never seemed to be thin enough."

Mia finished the story, and Ana and Mia both turned to me. I saw they were holding each other's hands and their bracelets were showing.

I noticed tears were starting to pierce my eyes.
"My god..... I'm .. So sorry, Ana and Mia, I .. If I'd known I would've tried to.."
"What ? Help us?" Mia snorted. "Please, we don't need your help, YOU need us. We've been living with this almost our entire lives. There is no changing us."
"Still, you two have had it so hard, it makes all the things I've complained about in my life small in comparison."
"We don't need your pity Amy, we want you to choose a side."
I looked at Ana.
"It's not really a choice is it?"

"It is, you could eat normal for the rest of your life and be 'healthy' as other people see it, or you could just have a taste of this, lose some weight, fit in, actually belong and not let yourself be defined by your body and the food you eat."
"Your choice" Mia added.

I looked at them both again and thought about everything they just said, their story, I thought about Rose, I thought about Evan, Yumi and my other friends.
Then I looked just past the Nervosa sisters with dead cold eyes and a straight face, and made my choice.