Ok, this is my attempt at some fiction, based mainly around things that have happened with the Hannarexia storyline. Hope you enjoy reading it.
Hannah lay on her bed, staring blankly up at the ceiling as she often did. Feeling alone and isolated from the people around her, ever so often clenching her stomach as she winced through the hunger pains she was having through not eating. Despite this, she kept on telling herself in her head that it was worth it and one day she would be as beautiful as Melissa had seemed.
Not much time had passed since Melissa’s death, but to Hannah it had felt like a heartbreaking eternity. She had once thought that nothing could ever hurt like breaking up with her ex boyfriend John Paul whom she had fallen completely in love with, only to have her emotions stripped and broken by him, leaving her feeling alone once more. She had always felt alone though, living a life of false smiles and faked happiness as she battled to find her place amongst her friends.
Sarah, who had once been her best friend, had taken the title of ‘the pretty one’, a role which Hannah both longed for and despised. Wherever they went together, Hannah would always sense the boys looking straight past her at Sarah. This fact wouldn’t have been so hard for Hannah to swallow if Sarah had been able to walk away from such attention. But this wasn’t the case. Hannah could be surrounded by a room full of people, but if Sarah was there she always felt invisible, even to Sarah herself, who she called her best friend for so long. This filled Hannah with an untameable jealousy. Upon finding a man that she could love, Sarah had almost forgotten that Hannah had ever existed. As Hannah lay there in her room, thinking of the girl that was once her best friend, she too had forgotten things, the good times were a long lost memory, the girly sleepovers and the days spent shopping together meant nothing to her now. The sadness Hannah felt as she thought about it coarsed through her veins like a poison. She couldn’t get away from the upset she was feeling, it seemed like these bitter feelings were all she had left. The Happier times had all faded. The girl that her family and friends had loved, despite sometimes not showing it enough, had long gone.
Hannah turned slowly towards her bedside cabinet and took out the diary she had been keeping. She flicked through the pages, seeing the messages she had written about herself and her struggle to become thin. To Hannah it had become more than that now, it had taken over her life. Melissa had offered Hannah a hand to hold when there was no one else who would. Hannah felt so ugly deep down, No matter how beautiful she looked on the outside, and she really had always looked beautiful. She had been a cheerful girl, with bright blue eyes and a sweet face. She had been kind natured and well liked aswell. But none of that mattered anymore. The features that had once been there, her smile and bright eyes, had all long faded. The Hannah that everyone had known was no more, and to look at her as she was now, it looked as though the things that had once made her beautiful were gone forever. Hannah got up from her bed shakily, frail from the lack of food she had eaten. She stood in front of her full length mirror in her pyjamas which hung loosely off of her tiny body. But as she looked at herself, Hannah didn’t see a tiny body, she didn’t see beauty and she felt instantly disgusted at what she saw, not because of how thin and pale she looked, but because she still saw herself as fat and ugly (despite the fact that she had never been either of those things). As she stood there, she could hear the muffled sound of her family talking downstairs. She wasn’t able to hear exactly what was being said, but she thought it must have been about her judging by the fact that she was all they ever seemed to talk about lately. She frowned and thought to herself ‘why can’t they just leave me alone? It’s my body and they don’t understand how I feel. How could they? No one understands’. She could imagine what was happening and being said; her mum would be stood there with a deeply worried expression as she always seemed to at the moment, unable to take her mind off of what was happening to her little girl, blaming herself for not seeing the signs earlier and trying to come up with a solution, Rhys would be angry and struggling to understand how this had all come about and he’d no doubt be thinking of Gilly, his best friend who he had lost through all of this, Josh was still trying to grasp an understanding aswell, to him it seemed as though Hannah was just being stupid and stubborn. He would be asking why no one was taking any action to make Hannah get better. She couldn’t hear her dad’s voice and so presumed he was at the family’s shop as he often was. Trying to serve customers whilst battling with thoughts of the broken family he would be returning to later.
Hannah had had enough of trying to listen to what they were saying; it was all pointless now anyway. They knew what had been going on, there were no more accusations of drugs and Melissa was no longer there for them to blame. She didn’t want to defend herself against them anymore; they just wanted to make her eat. Eating was the last thing she wanted to do. Melissa had come to her after she had died and told her how her family would use her death to try and make Hannah eat. Melissa would have rather died than been fat, kept in hospital being fed by tubes, barely being kept alive. In the end, that was exactly what had happened to her. Hannah had hated seeing her friend die, as of course anyone would, but Melissa had been more than just a friend, she had been Hannah’s motivation, Melissa had inspired her and made her believe that one day, she would be beautiful. Hannah had been reluctant to leave her family behind when Melissa had suggested they run away to Milan, but now as she sat there alone listening to her family talking about her downstairs, she wished she was miles away from there. Hannah struggled to cling on the memories in her head of the words of encouragement Melissa had always given, the thoughts pounded through her head, go running, don’t eat, drink lots of water. But Hannah barely had the energy to move now, let alone run anywhere. She hadn’t eaten for days. “Melissa I need you!” she said to herself as she fell to the floor with her head in her hands, tears rolling down her pale, sunken face. Melissa had been there for awhile after her death, Hannah had been so overjoyed that although her friend had died, she wasn’t entirely lost. Even if she was seeing things, Hannah hadn’t cared. All she wanted in the world was a friend, not like Sarah or Nancy who had only come out of hiding after being told about her condition and certainly not like John Paul. He only seemed to care because he blamed himself for what had happened to her. It hurt so much to think that Melissa had now gone for good, She had told Hannah that she would always be there even after she had passed away but one day, as Hannah walked with Sarah and Nancy, she looked back and saw Melissa waving goodbye. At the time Hannah had felt better, genuinely thinking that it might be time to move on, perhaps even to start recovering, so she had waved back. That was the last time she had seen Melissa.
As the tears continued to sting her tired eyes, Hannah wished she hadn’t waved goodbye. She wanted Melissa to be with her now; she wasn’t able to keep this up on her own. “I haven’t forgotten you!” She sobbed. “I need you so much, I miss you” She felt a hand on her shoulder “I told you I would always be here, didn’t I?” said a once familiar voice. Hannah was startled and filled with disbelief. She turned around slowly, gasping for breath and feeling her heart thumping in her chest. “you…you came back! But I thought you had gone forever?” “Oh come on, you thought you’d gotten rid of me that easily?” smiled Melissa. “You’re dead though…at first I thought I was just seeing you because I wanted to, I thought I was imagining things” Said Hannah, very confused at what she was seeing before her. “I know” Melissa sighed “and that is why you can see me, If you didn’t want me here I wouldn’t be. I’ll never leave your thoughts though will I? and through that, I will always be here”. Hannah was at once both pleased and scared. Her friend who she needed and had missed so dearly had appeared to her, but from what she had said, it seemed Hannah would never be free. At times Hannah did worry about what was happening to her. It wasn’t normal to faint or for her not to have periods, she knew that. But being thin was more important right now. Even when she had tried to eat again she couldn’t. She was stuck.
“Haven’t you felt me here the whole time?” said Melissa sounding slightly hurt “well, I saw you go, I thought that was it” Hannah replied. “It could have been. But you still need and want me, you said it yourself” Melissa said, trying to explain. “you were right though, they did try and make me eat again after you died” Hannah said angrily. “ugh, we knew they would, why don’t people understand? It’s none of their business. Have you been strong?” Melissa asked. “I’m trying, but they know everything now, Mum found my food stash under the floorboards. I bet they are down there talking about what they can do with me.” Hannah gritted her teeth as she said it, furious that her family were plotting against her. “keep up the good work, I know you’ve been trying hard to hide all this from them. Just think how long it took them to realise in the first place! You’re cleverer than they are” Melissa offered Hannah the words of encouragement that she had been longing for. “I don’t know how long I can keep it up for though. I passed out the other day when Sarah and John Paul were here. They were arguing about it, Sarah was blaming him for what is happening to me, but all she really wants is another reason to have a go at him after what he did with Craig.” Tears fell down Hannah’s cheeks once more as she thought of how selfish they had been, coming round and using her as fuel for their argument. “I had a panic attack and passed out and now Mum and Sarah have completely freaked out. I even had to eat something. I don’t have the energy to run it off either.” “They’ll try and put you in hospital too, and force feed you too probably. I went through it all.” Melissa said bitterly.
“But…I mean…do you ever wish you’d stopped? Do you wish what happened…hadn’t happened?” Hannah said sheepishly, afraid of the answer she would get. Melissa looked sadly down at the floor “of course. But it isn’t as easy as that is it. Because you are right in what you said, I would rather have died than got fat whilst I was alive”. “But now?” asked Hannah “I just…sometimes wonder if there is something wrong…I keep telling myself there isn’t but I just feel so tired and ill”. “you just wonder, wouldn’t thing be easier if you ate something…I know how you feel…of course I felt that way at times” Melissa said with an air of regret in her voice “But how can you eat when you can’t bare it? When just looking at food makes you feel sick. Everything you eat tastes like poison…Look at the clothes I got to wear, they were fabulous! Can you imagine them on someone bigger? They’d look awful.”
Hearing it said to her in such a way made Hannah wonder. Had it really come to this? If she carried on this way would she have the same ending as her ill fated friend? She tried to think of all the meals she used to sit down to with her family, memories which should have been good seemed painful to her now. She couldn’t imagine ever being the same again. How could she get out of this when she wasn’t even sure she wanted to?
“But…I do regret it…barely anyone was there at my funeral, just you, Sarah and my mum. All I will be remembered as is the girl who died through being anorexic. Not for how beautiful I was. That’s what I wanted to be remembered for” Melissa actually sounded weak and terribly sad. Hannah had never head her speak in this way. Thin had always meant everything to Melissa, being anorexic had been her life and ultimately her death. It was now, as Hannah sat there looking at the ghostly form of her lost friend, unable to fully believe what she was seeing, that she wondered if there was actually something wrong. It was in this moment that her friend didn’t seem all that she had once been. Melissa, who Hannah had thought of as so strong and sure of what she had been doing, now seemed to question it all.
As Hannah looked across at the mirror once more, lifting up her pyjama top so that she could see her painfully thin body beneath, she couldn’t help but fear that she too would never be free from this. The person Hannah had held as her inspiration was gone, but clearly not forgotten. Melissa might have died, but she still remained as a deadly voice of encouragement within her thoughts.
*~* Author of 'Friend's never say goodbye' a Hannah fanfic *~*
x
, even when all you want to do is cry.
nevermind!
