94 THE RED LINE www.overtheredline.com
tionalised and ruined beyond help, not like the mottled one; at least not yet. There is a small mercy. The drugs I am forced to take means I feel next to nothing. I sleep around the clock. I occasionally remember pieces of my former life; the life in which I had been feigning ‘normal’. I had known it wasn’t normal to hide away and cry a lot and obsess about death. I had been flirting with Anorexia and bulimia for a couple of years. I was hovering on ill but not quite diagnosable. While many of my peers obsessed over boyfriends I was contemplating running away and slitting my wrists; there wasn’t much common ground. I was isolated; lonely. My peculiar eating and sleeping habits meant I eventually passed out on the shop floor, regaining consciousness, bleeding, from where my head had hit the lami-
nated concrete. I think that must have been the tipping point, the place of no return. I certainly lost my job that day. The fainting, I suspect, is how I came to be detained. That’s what got me to A&E, where they rolled up my sleeves and found the fresh scars. “What happened?” they’d asked. “The rabbit,” was all I could think of to say. “What’s it got then, shark’s teeth?” said one of the nurses (herself in long sleeves). All I could do was laugh, funny though it wasn’t. I am locked away; in an actual prison now. The walls were previously invisible