I started making up a world where my needs did not exist at all.

It was hard to judge where this started. This being lying on the bathroom floor at three in the morning with chills running up and down his body. This being exhausted but unable to sleep. This being craving salt and sugar and calories and wanting it with all his being but being unable to bring it to his mouth. This being chewing food and spitting it out of windows, into bags, into toilets. This being chugging saltwater, doing jumping jacks, and shoving three fingers down his throat to get rid of the danger that is anything not a safe food. This being staring back at a reflection with bloodshot eyes, thinning hair, chapped lips, and discolored skin.

This being dying.

It’s not like he was always like this. He wasn’t raised in a family with personality disturbance and emphasis on food, the perfect concoction for an anoretic. He didn’t grow up with self-loathing; doubt and hatred were not things woven into his being with years of permanence. He wouldn’t even have considered himself truly unhappy at any point of his life. Until he became an idol and realized that fear and pressure were physical entities and tears were weaker than sweat, no matter what people said.

Lu Han found no real comfort in the feeling of being empty.

Not anymore.

In truth, these things were not quick. He didn’t just stop eating one day. He didn’t just suddenly resent the space he took up in this world nor loathe the way his body looked in the mirror. He never pursued what he was, and he didn’t enjoy being the way he was. In fact, it was quite the opposite. It just something that he became.

Sometimes he thinks that his tears were poison and that holding them back was what dragged him down so deep. God knows he can’t keep them in anymore.

He doesn’t even know if he could ever get rid of the poison.

I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.

Luhan felt an extreme amount of guilt. They were all being subjected to diets. He had no reason to feel so disgusted with himself; it was not a verdict placed only on his shoulders. It was the simplest way to maintain the ideal body that SM wanted them to have. Diet and dance practice and exercising means they would all look perfect.

Because being fat was something that didn’t slide for EXO.

He took it in stride at first, along with the rest of the members. It wasn’t hard, really. They cut down on takeout and chicken and sweet drinks, ate more food cooked in the dorms, made sure they consumed more vegetables and less salt. Suho was constantly asking people if they wanted a bottle of water, trying to keep everyone hydrated and away from things like bubble tea. Admittedly, it was probably hardest for Tao and Sehun at first. Tao had always eaten more than everyone else and suddenly had to learn the meaning of “portion control,” and Sehun’s bubble tea intake was now under fire.

To be honest, Luhan had never even had a problem with his body before. Sure, it would be nice to be a bit more muscular. But he liked what he had.

So, the day he woke up and looked in the mirror, feeling tendrils of disgust curling up his throat and seizing his stomach while polluting his eyes, surprised would have described him best. He remembered almost laughing it off in his head and going about his day.

Self-loathing wasn’t really something he felt.

Later, when he was confronted with a huge bowl of dessert after a concert, he felt rickety branches of fear lightly his skin, goosebumps crawling up his skin, breath drawn in between a trembling jaw. He ignored it. It was sugar, it tasted good, he was fine. He ate it, laughed with his brothers, laughed and enjoyed himself.

It was just a weird emotion, a one-time thing.

    I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.

He quickly forgot the first time he ate dinner as normal and ran to the bathroom to frantically lift up his shirt, positive that the food had turned right into fat, widening his thighs, coating his ribs, storing itself on his chest. He looked at himself in the mirror, eyes wide and terrified, seeing nothing but the bulge that was his stomach full of dinner.

That time, the revulsion was not subtle. It hit him hard, beat him in the throat and head and joints as he fought not to collapse.

...Fat.

The word spun in his head in circles and seemed to take root in his skin, and he felt like it was a word that was an identity, not a describer.

I cannot be fat.

He let his shirt drop and rejoined the other members in the living room. He returned to Minseok’s side, looking at his smile, feeling one creep across his own face. Luhan let himself be distracted, allowed himself to feel the warmth from others, almost forgetting the three letter word that had settled in his stomach.

Almost.

    A wish to prove that you need nothing, that you have no human hungers, which turns on itself and becomes a searing need for the hunger itself.

After the thoughts took root, it wasn’t a downward spiral. It was more of a strange staircase with lots of platforms and turns, where Luhan had periods of almost-normality. It was confusing, stressful, and horrifying. Sometimes he wanted nothing more than to never eat a bite ever again, waste away, and drop dead. Sometimes he questioned what he was thinking and engorged himself with meats and rices and sweets and enjoyed the movement of his jaw and the feeling of it in his stomach.

Most of the time, he ate normally and felt horrendous for it.

He questioned his self-control, pinched the skin on his hips, ate fast food and enjoyed the taste while hating himself, grew into the self-hatred that was being to wrap itself into every inch of his being.

He told himself to just stop. Don’t put the food in your mouth. Resist.

He promptly found himself eating without a care, depositing calorie after calorie on his tongue. Apparently, he couldn’t fight temptation. Once he finished whatever it was, he found that his disgust for being full, his disgust from eating, and his disgust at himself for not having self-control bundled themselves together into a massive rock of sadness and anger and guilt that settled itself in his abdomen.

Skipping one or two meals just to binge alone later was not doing anything but make him want to die.

He was growing to enjoy that empty feeling more than he cared to admit.

    You are either alive, or you are decaying, and there is no grey area.

Luhan could, however, pinpoint the first time he went an entire day without eating anything. I’m busy, I’m not hungry, he didn’t even have time to think about eating or not eating. It wasn’t until he was laying in bed, mind hazy and being tainted with the first layers of sleep, did he realize that he hadn’t had one bite.

The satisfaction he felt was mingled with a sense of horror.

This was real and it was happening.

After that day, it was frequent that he skipped whole meals, trading them for small snacks, things that he felt were safe to eat, things he could eat without being entirely consumed with the thought he would get fat. He knew something was happening: his body was tired, and his insides often fluttered in strange ways that made him certain he was going to drop dead.

But he knew he wouldn’t. He wasn’t skinny.

The first time he caught Minseok staring at him with worry when he declined yet another meal was the first time he found out what crushing guilt felt like. He was convinced he was horrible and a monster that was hurting s, but he was too selfish to stop and too fat to even contemplate putting more than a bite of the meat in his mouth.

Luhan felt like the world had just bludgeoned him in the back of the knees, and he fought to keep tears, bile, and gasps at bay. He must not hurt them more with his tears.

He’s already done enough.

He didn’t start eating more.

The empty feeling began to consume him.

    There was a time you didn’t try to get out of your own skin.

There came a time when temptation was merely that: a temptation. He did not cave in and stuff more food in his mouth than his body could handle. He did not even think he could. He found that the thought of food, of sweets, of fats and sugars and salts, plagued him constantly. He eventually realized that physically, mentally, emotionally he would not be able to eat.

Days started to go by with nothing.

He learned what dizziness and sickness felt like, experienced the shame in his hair coming out between his fingers and the sight of his nails turning strange shades of definitely-not-pink, became one with nausea that never seemed to let up, found that anything more than approximately eleven bites of anything would send him into the bathroom throwing up involuntarily with intense stomach pains.

He questioned whether this was what he wanted.

He stepped on the scale, felt a cold sense of dread at the number, looked at himself half in the mirror.

He counted his ribs, the notches of his spine. He felt his thumb and middle fingers touch over the middle of his thighs, almost wrapped his hand around his upper arm. He in slightly, watching the extra definition of his pelvic bone and hipbones stretch the skin just a bit more. He prodded his cheeks, looked at the softness of his back, the middle of his thighs.

Fat.

He put his clothes back on and stepped out of the bathroom, wondering if he looked as dead as he felt.

    I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.

Luhan supposed that he should say something. He supposed that he should get help. He knew that knowing you were going to die if you kept up your current behavior and, frankly, not caring was incredibly wrong and twisted, and that fed into his reservoir of guilt. He knew the others, s and the fans, were worried. He knew that he couldn’t dance the way he used to. He knew he couldn’t flatout exist the same the way he used to.

The sense of apathy and hatred he had towards himself was astounding.

He had taken to spending an inordinate amount of time curled up on his bathroom floor in either pajamas or half-. He laid there, stared at the scale out of the corner of his eye, the clear glass looking far too innocent for the meaning it carried in his mind. His vision grew distorted in the weirdest way from the effect of the bright white bathroom lights searing above him. He felt his spine dig into the tile and almost couldn’t even care.

Why should he care about the bones that stuck out when he still was fat.

It was like a weight had settled over his heart, drawing attention to the palpations and sickness and feeling of death.

If he had to sum up a way it felt to be Lu Han the anorectic, he would say it felt like decomposing while breathing.

    You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel alright because you feel like all of the time, and you can’t remember what it was like before. People take the feeling of full for granted. They take for granted the feeling of steadiness, of hands that do not shake, heads that do not ache, throats not raw with bile and small rips from fingernails forced in haste to the gag spot. Stomachs that do not begin to dissolve with a battery-acid mixture of caffeine and pills. They do not wake up in the night, calves and thighs knotting with muscles that are beginning to eat away at themselves. They may or may not be awakening in the night by their own inexplicable sobs.

    You being to rely on the feeling of hunger, your body’s raucous rebellion at the small tortures of your own hands. When you eventually being to get well, health will feel wrong, it will make you dizzy, it will confuse you, you will get sick again because

   sick is what you know.