The Story: Chapter Three. Food.

After our first fight, I tiptoed around sensitive subjects when I talked to him. It didn't work. Our fights started out slowly; once a month, twice, three times, once a week, twice a week, every day. Although it would start off as something small, like a disagreement over food, it always ended in a screaming match. Who could yell louder; who could hurt the other's feelings quicker; who would apologize first? The answer varied time to time, but after the first three or four months he was the one who yelled the loudest. He was the one to call me something I hadn't been called since middle school. But I was always the one to apologize first, even when I knew it wasn't my fault.

The first year flew by and I don't remember hardly any of it. It's a grey area in the story of my life and I honestly would like to keep it that way. Block out the negativity and move on. To be honest after staying with him for half a year, I started giving up. I started letting him control me and my friendships. He started telling me how I spent too much time with my friends and fed lies about how terrible they were to me behind my back. I knew it wasn't true because I trusted my small group of friends. We'd grown up together and Bree just happened to fit in perfectly. So that's what our fights started to be about. I was a terrible girlfriend to his saint of a boyfriend who would never do anything to hurt me and would always love me. 

Then why would he always wind up yelling when I said something -in his eyes- wrong? Why would he always laugh at me while mascara black tears ran down my rosy cheeks? At this point, I started using food to cope. I excessively binged and he started to notice that I was gaining weight. Trust me, I noticed too. He made sure to let me know it whenever we would argue. He'd laugh and call me fat. Worthless. Ugly. He even called me a cow at one point. That's when I started giving up not only on him, but on myself. I started keeping my mouth shut. For those of you who don't really know me, when I get really insecure or depressed or even anxious, I shut down. I refuse to talk, I hide away, and I sleep. This is what caused this form of "coping". 

Anyway, after being called "tubby" and "cow", he decided to take my body into his own hands. He questioned me about what I was eating every day. He began giving me "dieting tips" about how eating less at every meal would make me lose weight faster! I was an idiot and listened. This didn't help me lose weight AT ALL because when he shut off his phone for the night, I ran to the kitchen to eat as much as I could before feeling sick to my stomach. He never knew that I was still binging, but still condoned starving myself. This happened more frequently when he decided to stay with me on the phone all night long. I wouldn't eat for days at a time. The weekend was the BEST because I could eat and lie to him. He wasn't watching me eat lunch or a snack at break. It got to the point where I started losing weight and you could tell if you looked at my body. It was slimmer, my curves were going away, but I still felt disgusting. 

He still called me fat after losing 20 pounds. He still called me ugly. My body still wasn't good enough. So, I decided to keep barely eating but I would make myself sick afterwards. This became an every day thing after he would make me feel guilty for eating anything at all, even if it was a single cracker. At this point, I was willing to do anything for him. He threatened to leave me, saying that he had skinnier, blonde girls with big boobs lined up to take my place. I like to call this time period of my life the grey area because I wasn't living in white or black. I was numb, wanting to drink until I blacked out. I was craving to feel some sort of emotion other than this robotic and slavelike state, bowing down to his every command and putting on a blank stare as his voice grew louder and more offensive. I have never wanted to die in my life until this point in time.