Beautiful things - jaylor story (peace book 4)

it's not goodbye, it's see you later

These are the moments I want to bottle up and remember forever, us having fun as a family. 

**

Joe and I are upstairs doing the last of his packing before he leaves tonight. He made sure to have a flight after the girls went to bed and not tomorrow morning. It's hard for the girls when he leaves so we don't want to say goodbye in the morning and then they have to go to school. 

"Promise me you will tell me if it gets too much Taylor. If it gets too much for you i will drop everything and come home" he says and come over and wrap his arms around my waist and I wrap mine around his neck. "I promise. But we will be fine" 

Deep down I don't want him to go, I never want to be away from him, but its apart of our jobs and we just need to deal with it. I know how much he wanted to do this movie and I'm not going to take that away from him. He lets me do my thing all the time and I want to give him room to do the same thing too. 

"You are my world Taylor. You and the girls. That's the most important thing to me" he says and lean down for a long kiss. 

-Ellies Pov- 

I'm down in the home dance studio that used to be a home gym but years ago they put in a dance floor here and removed most of the workout equipment. It's just a running mill and some weights here now that my parents use. 

On the weekends I love to spend time down here and practice what I've been working on in ballet. Tomorrow, I get to start taking my three private lessons and a dance class too. It's so exiting to get back to class, and the next week after that I get another class and then the week after I get the last class. It all depends on if I keep gaining weight or not, but I have been doing that. I've had to add fortisips but I'm forcing myself to drink them so I can dance. 

I've learned that I would do anything to get to dance now. When it got taken from me when I landed in the hospital, I felt empty, but when I dance, I feel more like myself. 

I put on my point shoes and do some basic barre exercises to get my body going after doing a warmup in my slippers. 

It took a bit of convincing to get to do some of this at home again, but they see how good it is for me so they make adjustments so I can dance as much as I want and need. It's not just that I want to do it, but I also need to keep myself sane. To me dance is what music is to my mom and acting is to my dad. It's my passion and I really want to dance in a company one day, it would be amazing. But I also want to go to college and become a lawyer, so we will see what happens with time. 

The calories I have to consume is insane, it's so annoying but I know that's the condition I have to follow. I eat a lot more than normal 12-year old's need to eat because I work out so much, so I need to take those calories, and then I need to eat more than that too, so I gain weight. It's a lot to deal with but my parent's control that and I just close my eyes and eat whatever they give me. I actually don't know the exact calories, I can guess with what I know about nutrition, but they don't tell me how much I'm eating to avoid triggering me. 

It's hard to figure out what I want because it's such a fight in my head between the anorexic voice and then the voice that wants to do the right thing so I can dance. I'm slowly starting to realize that the weight isn't really the real problem, the problem is that I've used food to control the bad thoughts and handle what happened all those years ago. My therapist keeps saying that the food isn't the problem, the problem is that I've tried to starve away my thoughts, so I don't have to deal with them. ,

I watch my feet in the mirror reflecting the work I'm doing. It's hard to not focus on how my body looks because as a dancer that's part of my job, I need to make sure my form and technique is correct, but I don't want to be hyper focused about what I look like in the mirror. When I look in the mirror, I see how I should suck in my stomach more, I see the fat on my arms, thighs and stomach. There isn't anything I like about my body when I look in the mirror, so I try to focus on the technical stuff, how my arms are, how my hips are aligned and how my turnout is. It helps to focus on the things I can control, my technique, and not how my body looks.