Anorexia

"Where is it coming from, this echo, this huge No that surrounds you...?"

There was always this sense that I can't. Just can't. Or shouldn't. Whatever it was, I shouldn't.

It seems that in this day and age of technology and paparazzi our generation is being forced to stare into an unreal image of what the media wants us to feel like we should look like. This may seem pessimistic and crudely blunt but it seems that there are extremely over-weight kids and super-skinny ones. What ever happened to a good normal sized teenager, or adult for that matter?

It's sad that we live in a world where more and more people are obese and at the same time models are dying from anorexia and bulimia. On the one hand the foods that we as a society are quickly consuming are full of junk and at the same time our girls (and some boys) are not eating anything, leaning over their toilets and letting go of what they ate, because of pressures to look a certain way.

It isn’t me, someone else is suffering. I couldn’t.
Not like this. Everything that has happened,
cover it with a black cloth,
then let the torches be removed…
Night. -- Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem” (translated by Sasha Mayakovsky)

On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in
her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor
characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear
(everyone whispered there) - 'Could one ever describe
this?' And I answered - 'I can.' It was then that
something like a smile slid across what had previously