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(The author of this article is a 16-year-old girl from an Eastern European country. We decided to protect her identity.)

"And I know that when I'll be old I will remember these times and I will be sorry that I've wasted them like this. And I'll wish I will go back to them, and be young again. But I just can't help it."

Three days ago I accidentally deleted all my diary files from the computer. I said to myself: this is the last dip in the glass. This is the complete tragedy. This is the loss of all my past and along with it my future, too. This is losing all your memories about who you are or what you've done. Desperately, I called my father in search for an escape. The tears had started falling down on my cheeks and once again I started crying like I did on approximately every day. My mother was leaving to meet a friend of her's. Not important. So I called my father. Please, dad, take me out. Please, dad, save me. Please make it come back. The diary I mean. He said, write it again.

This is the 5th day when I'm throwing up. I think today I threw up plums combined with cheap chocolate ice cream. Pretty disgusting. On the way to the toilet I forgot about dragging up the toilet seat so I threw up on it, as well as on the floor. Yesterday I threw up, too. Today I'll throw up, too. Every day of my life I have a different vomiting menu. On Saturday, for instance, I threw up tortellini with cheese. On Sunday I tried to go to the beach but I threw up in the central park. The leftovers are still there, reminding me of the puking sessions early, early in the morning. When you throw up every day of your life you have a certain feeling that you're cleaning yourself up. Maybe it's good. Mum said I should go see a doctor. I won't. I like my throwing up session. It feels clean after it. I have still that smell in my mouth. It's gross. Today I've eaten too much mellon. I'll probably throw it up in a trip to the bathroom. Today I won't forget to take the toilet seat up.

I'm staying in my room and sweating. The air is so hot.. but I'm too lazy to open up the windows. I indulge in the temperature. I wanna stay like this forever and never have to wake up.. never go out again - never listen to anything anymore. This is me.

Only two rooms filled with arranged furniture, painted in relaxing colours as my mother read in a house magazine, we have some sort of plants that we forgot to take care of. The TV is always on, the stereo, the books, the dust and the most important of them all: the computer. I said to myself once, if I lost it, I'll commit suicide in a minute. Sometimes I have an urge to break everything with a big baseball bat, like the one my father has in his car. It will be the freedom. Yeah, this is my house.

My mother works as a teacher at a local school. It's the same school as I go, too. She's a French teacher. My dad is a writer. He has a moustache. He's the most egocentric man I have ever seen.

My parents are split up. My father slept with my mum's sister, and, oh, he also had a wife and 2 children but.. I don't care. I'm not traumatized by family.

These are my parents.

I don't like to tell stories. To people. I don't like to talk. People don't listen, so I don't talk. Anymore. When I tell something to anyone, that person is thinking about something else, and is not interested. I don't like that. So I don't talk anymore. My boyfriend tells me that I should talk more. But I won't. People don't listen so I don't talk. People always tell stories to me. People let themselves go with me. They tell me everything, secrets, dark stuff, about their parents, what they did, where they went. People trust me. I know how to listen to them and make them feel important. I know how to ask them questions and when. People use me as their own personal therapist. Only I'm cheaper, I'm free actually. They call me and talk for hours about their problems. No one has the time to hear about my problems. They probably imagine that I don't have problems, they don't even think about it. They think I'm a ball of happiness, just waiting to hear them and heal them. I hate people.

I wasn't always like that. No one is always like that. My mother raised me in a religious way. My dad conviced me to go to church again, now, after a decade. Everytime I go to church I ask myself what in god's name I am doing here. I go to my own personal favorite Jesus Christ icon, and pray. I don't know why I pray. I don't feel like anyone is listening. The old people around me detest me. I hate the sound that they make with their lips when they kiss an icon. Like.. why they kiss it? Why? Is it some old legend, some old saying.. is it? It is not. I hate old people. They should be shot. Most of them are fat and ugly and don't smell too good. They go to the church every Sunday so they can feel good about themselves, but they have never even read the Bible. Most of them were big sinners in their youth. I see them as big balls of sins, rusty, old, ugly and smelly balls of sins. But I like to light up candles. Every time I put one for my dad and for my mum. And than I put one for Tupac Shakur and one for any friend of mine. Every Sunday I choose a different friend. There's an old lady there, she must be like two hundred years. She lives in my block, on the 10th floor. She's crazy. I once saw her praying in front of a grocery store.

These are the Sunday mornings.

My boyfriend. I don't have him from long time. I can remember seeing him 5 or 6 times until the moment of writing. I didn't have a boyfriend for a long time. And of course I found a reason to suffer because of this. Now I have it and I'm not enjoying it as much as I thought I would. Every time I have to meet him I pray he doesn't show up, so I could come back to my room, to my computer, to my home. But he does show up. He is never late. Never ever. I am doing this only to socialize myself. So I won't be considered a geek. I am doing this because I have to, not because I want to. I hate the routine of having a date, and having to show up at the exact time. Before every date I always do the same thing. Get naked, shower, wax, dress up, brush my teeth, spray, put my original Adidas sport shoes on, take my keys, ask mum for money, and out I go. Got it? Get naked, shower, wax, dress up, brush my teeth, spray, put my original Adidas sport shoes on, take my keys, ask mum for money, get naked, shower, epilate, dress up, brush my teeth,.. It's the routine and it's killing me day by day. Yeah, this is my love life.

Friends. I would rather spend two whole days with one of my friends instead of spending time with a boyfriend. It's much more relaxing, much more fun, I don't have to worry about what my hair looks like, if I have something stuck in my teeth or if I forgot to wax or not. I can say everything I want, whenever I want, I can curse all day long and say words like fuck, bitch, ass, cunt, without fearing someone will feel offended. With friends I am much more honest. I don't have to turn my head a little to the right so that my sept deviation will not be noticed. I don't have to do this stuff. I don't have to be dressed in my most expensive clothes. And it's much more comfortable. I have all sorts of friends: psychopaths, pathological liars, perverts, sex maniacs, bisexuals, agoraphobics, idiots, paranoiacs, alcoholics, suicidals, life-sux-ers, drug addicts, TV addicts, nymphomaniacs.. hm.. And in this mixture, this mix of people that I "like" to call my friends.. where do I fit in? If I knew I would be happy. I don't have many of them. Many friends I mean. If I think better I don't have any. Any real friend. There is not such a thing as a real friend, or real friendship. Everything is just an illusion, an illusion to fit in the boundaries of the everyday life, or better said: everyday lie. When I look at my friends I thank God that I didn't end up to be like that. Thank God I am not like that. Thank God. Thank you, God. The lie goes so far that my friends really believe they care about me. Yes, it's a lie, too. They think they care about me but they don't. I am their friend, I have their secrets, I know them, the real them, so - they have to care about me. This is how it works. If by any chance you are 13 years old, have just started secondary school and think that you will be having lots of friends, well, you won't. Mwahaha. Believe me, this stupid myth on that FRIENDS TV show does not exist. You don't have friends. Friends do not exist. There is no such thing as friends. Repeat after me. I have no friends. Another time. I have no friends.

A year I ago I found my salvation, my freedom, my enlightening. You stay home, in your comfortable new black chair, watch yourself your belly that is becoming more and more fat, then watch your melted flesh surrounding you and you get fatter and fatter day by day. And you're grossing yourself. And than you look at your desk and see your drawing instruments from your drawing class. You're too lazy to cry and have no reason to smile. So you look at the desk and observe the objects. Two sheets of paper with some ugly sketches, a 2B little pencil, a black marker that you bought at some cheap store 20 kilometers away from your home, that pink gum that you chew up in your past time, that pen that your friend gave it to you, a paper cutter, another gum, this one stolen from a store with a friend, some comics magazines that you copied some drawing of, some.. hey - wait a minute - a paper cutter!

What is the most creative thing a person could do with a paper cutter?

Cut paper?

Try to cut bread but don't manage to?

Look at it?

Scratch your name on your red furniture desk?

Then you look at your body and see the fat and you just want to make it go away, 'cause you think, this may be your salvation. But it isn't. So you take that cutter and watch it closely. And you think for a moment: "What if?"

And this is how I started hurting myself. This is my salvation. Self destruction. Bang my head on the wall and cut my arms until the flesh starts to drop out. Pull my hair down and cut my scalp, then put salt on it. Then spit on me and step on me with your feet. And trash me. This is what I dream of.

But then again I wasn't always like that.

Self destruction is my own personal system of defense. Some people defend themselves by repressing the stuff the bothers them. Others by making fun of themselves and joking and laughing and keeping their mind busy from their sufferance. There are others, the hysterical ones, that scream and lament and stuff - this is what they use for their defense mechanism. It's true. My therapist told me. I use self destruction. Is that wrong?

Sometimes when I cut I felt bad that it didn't hurt too much. You know - that annoying feeling that you get when you want something to happen but it doesn't - we all felt it at least once. Hmm - for some reason this reminds me of the night I went out to smoke pot for first time.

I was happy I finally had a joint. Not that I didn't have the money or I didn't know where to get it from - but was too damn lazy to take care of this. So I got the pot. When you smoke normal cigarettes you have the feeling that you're killing yourself one minute at a time. It's kind of frustrating. With drugs you have the feeling of doing something illegal and that is just SO cool. I got a friend and my rollerblades and just went to the end of our city - where we could find a place less crowded. The sun was burning and the temperature was very very high. We took a small little road, because we thought it was the quietest one. There were no trees, and the heat was getting more and more insupportable. I felt like I was going to melt. And I was wearing my LONG trousers. The road was full of trash and little stones and rocks and shit and it just very messy. My feet were getting all wet in my rollerblades and probably all smelly. And suddenly I stopped for a moment and thought: "Jesus, what the hell am I doing this for?" Yeah, it was meaningless. I could just have stayed home and smoked the pot in home, but no, I had to go on that stupid road and smoke it. I have never been a clever child.

I smoked the joint sitting on an amount of grass filling my new blue pants with bugs and some green stuff. We could smell poo. Or was it manure? Couldn't know. So there I was, in the fucking middle of nowhere, getting one step ahead in my self destruction personal plan. Well, when you go on your rollerblades at a temperature of 40 degrees, for 5 or 6 miles, with an annoying friend that keeps telling you you're getting fatter, AND with LONG trousers - you gotta wish SOMETHING will happen. Nothing happened. Maybe it was fake shit or we didn't know how to smoke it but nothing happened. Not even giggling, not even feeling dizzy. Fucking nothing. And to think I spent my Pepsi Float money on that pot. So no laughing, no being high, no nothing. Shit. I though. I felt really stupid. Nevertheless, going home very disappointed some highlight really happened. I rose up the speed when going down without looking there was a pile of stones and rocks in the middle of the road. So my wheels stopped and of course I had to go face down with my face in the asphalt.

Finally, I hit rock bottom. I have never been that courageous to provoke myself a very big pain with the razors so - I finally got a big pain to deal with. Boom. My face hits asphalt. My eye hits a rock. My lips are splitting. I feel something in my nose. Some glass is entering some of my hand's skin. Blood. Blood. All over. You cannot imagine this until you've felt it. So the picture is falling and hitting the floor with the most important part of your body: the head. Yikes. Me hurts. Me feeling pain. Nobody helps. Cool.

I stayed there for a couple of seconds and then I got up. Some people were laughing at me. If it weren't for that people this could've been the happiest of my life. You wake up after a major moment like this and all you can think of is you made fun of yourself. Give jewelry to pigs. Me so paranoiac. I started blading again, slowly to find a reflecting mirror at a car to look at. I look and see my left face side covered with blood. I even got that blood taste in my mouth. I look at my teeth. All intact. My left eye was really bad. My lips were swollen. I had the red everywhere. My nose was bleeding. Cool. I had a very foggy look. Like that time you wake up after being drunk all night. I felt like throwing from the blood. This had happened before my throwing up days started so it was something new for that period of time. I had bruises all over. I think when your face is covered with scars and cuts you can feel better about yourself because you finally got an excuse for how bad you look. Don't look at my face, it's all screwed up. And people laugh and look at you. And you laugh at look at you. And you think you look like that because you got your bruises. And other people think you look like that because you got bruises. But you know that is not a lie.

After I fell I drank beer in the middle of the highway. Arrest me. Two law breaks on one day. Cool.

Sometimes my parents look at me as if I was completely insane. Sometimes they speak as if I wasn't even there.

"What kind of pills should we get her?"

"Should we call the doctor?"

"Should I tell the therapist about this?"

"She is feeling good, now."

"She is feeling worst, now."

"Do you think these pills are good for her?"

"Should we stop the Zoloft treatment?"

But they never ask me anything. They talk. They don't even bother to go into another room and talk about me. They talk behind my back, only in front of me. Sometimes I think I am invisible. My mother worries too much. This week she's been treating me so well. She gave me massages and breakfast in my bed and kissed and hugged me. Mum stop treating me like I was dying. But maybe I am.

My father is too tense. He calls me a stupid brat every time my mother calls him to come over, 'cause I am in a bad mood. I don't know why she calls him. My father told me she's afraid to stay alone with me. My parents don't know me. They think I am completely insane. And you gotta ask yourself - if your own parents think you're fucking out of your mind, then what do other people think?