I know it isn't much, everything that's happening right now. I know that most people go through so much worse, and I know I'll go through much worse too. I know that last year wasn't as bad as this year and next year, it'll probably be even worse than this, but right now it's more than I've ever been through before.

A year ago, I rode out my days and watched them melt into weeks and months and broken friendships in a drunken stupor, through hospitals and needles stuck up my arm and medications I was supposed to be on but never took.

I sit through my days now, after a few months of what I suppose was bliss. What, now, looking back, was absolute bliss. Months where food and throwing up blood in my second floor toilet weren't the only things on my mind. Months where they didn't even cross my mind. Months that didn't pass by me and my nicotine induced highs, my vomit-through-the-nose lows, because those didn't exist four months ago.

It's my fault again. It's always been my fault, actually, but I suppose that doesn't change just what a crappy place I'm in right now. That doesn't change the fact that no matter how hard I try, I'm just too far gone to bring myself back now.

I always knew this would happen to me. In the back of my mind, swirling through the depths of denial and the things you know are going to happen, but they're so far in the future that you don't bother to do anything to stop it. Things that you tell yourself you have time to fix, time to deal with, because the future is always so far away until it's all around you, crashing down on your head and spilling out of your stomach, through your mouth and into your toilet. The future that you light up and inhale, breathing out while you promise yourself that it's only self medication for anxiety. Two packs a day of self medication. A toothbrush down your throat of the future.

Of course I'll be the bulimic girl. It fits, doesn't it? The diet I've been on for three years now, the obsessive exercise the moment the scale hits anything over 93 pounds, the morning you take your shower and find the tiniest little bit of flab on your stomach, the stomach you could've sworn was flat last night. It all fits. I've known all along, but it was too far in the future for me to care. For me to stop and think, for a moment, about what might happen if it turns into the same addiction my best friend has had to nicotine for the last year and a half.

All the empty promises of, "Tomorrow, I'll start trying to get better," and "I'm going to throw up, just one more time," that come with all our addictions. An echo of the promises I'd make a year ago, the promises of, "I'll only drink this one bottle of wine tonight," and, "I'm not going to sleep with him,"

And then there's you, this absolutely amazing girl. This girl who I honestly only chose over the girl I could've fallen for, would've fallen for, because I thought that she could never mean anything, could never hurt me like everybody else. After Liz, after breaking another one of those promises that you know you can never really keep (I'm not getting involved with anybody anymore) and getting my heart run over by a tractor trailer for it, the last thing I needed was to fall in love again. To get hurt all over again.

Five months later, I'm sitting here and realizing that you know more about me than anybody. That I've never trusted anybody like you, never loved somebody the way I love you. Not even Kyra, the girl I spent two years chasing after and promising forever, the girl I dropped everything for, the girl who dropped me in the end. Five months later, I'm realizing that I've never been so completely honest with anybody as I am with you.

I've never lied to you. Ever. Except about the things that you're supposed to lie about to your exes who turn into your close friends, like, "I'm over you, really, I am," and, "No, you didn't hurt me," while you're sitting there with nothing but hurt and everything except being over her invading your every thought, turning into the air you breathe as it seeps out through your pores. The kind of lies that actually really do matter more than any other lies, but they're perfectly okay because they're the same lies every teenager recites through their broken hearts.

Nobody have ever tried to help me. Through all my problems and all my friends that've piled up over the years, nobody has ever tried to help. They've offered sympathetic looks and half-hearted hugs and pints of icecream, but honestly, nobody really wants things like that. You said talk. You meant it. You sat there and helped me while my thigh bled all over the hardwood floor and you told me I'd be okay, eventually.

I'm not going to say that I'm still in love with you, because I was never really in love with you before. But I'm in love with you now, to the point that I'm drowning in it. And it's dumb, really, because it's way too late. I screwed up when I had the chance and you're my friend and you have eyes for somebody, anybody but me, but nothing can really change what I feel. Which sounds cliche and stupid, but this whole fucking thing sounds cliche and stupid, so that fits right in here.

Before you, nobody knew I was raped when I was thirteen. Nobody knew just how deep rooted the sadness behind all the smiles I force for all the people who expect nothing less from me was. Nobody knew I lived in a park at the peak of my fourteen year old alcoholism. Nobody knew just how much I regretted all the boys and girls I slept with for dime bags and bottles of whiskey.

And you'll never know how much you mean to me. You'll never know what you make me feel when you hold my hand and try to keep me on some invisible path back to happiness, out of bulimia and self mutilation and all the hate that everybody around me seems to offer up.

But you do it, and you know everything else. You know about me, more than my own parents and the people who've known me since I was five do. It's a fair trade, I suppose.

So thank you. You haven't made me okay, but you've saved me from myself. Somehow, you gave me the hope, the possibility that maybe things will be okay again someday. That there is something in my life waiting for me past bulimia and all the pent up self-hatred I've been carrying around for the past six years.

You said you always wanted to save a life. You've saved mine.