TheMirrorOfAnIdealLife - Pt4

I suppose coming to know a truly beautiful woman would be next when I hit my A-Levels.

 

Sardhana really was gorgeous. I was just under 19 years of age and looked very sickly. She was a 21 year old, 5 foot 7, dark-eyed, dyed blonde stunner of Chinese, Dutch and Bengal parentage. I was totally smitten. Not in a physical way mind you as I was still very green on matters of physicality partly due to my own bizarre anatomy and partly also to do with my hold on being innocent to the very last.

 

She liked me. That much I knew. She often talked to me about personal things. Things which I knew that she shared only to me. Amidst the intensity of coursework, we often found time to hang out together and often went out together with other friends. Having very little spending money myself, I often limited my trips to the local shopping complexes where most of the days, all I could really afford was my own lunch and perhaps a bar of chocolate at the end of the day. Not that it mattered of course for I really craved her company.

 

As things developed, I began to have very strong feelings for her. It was love. But to this day, I can’t remember for the life of me whether it was romantic love I felt then. All I know is that I felt something for her. I knew not what. I was still unsure in matters physical.

 

It was also during this time that I found out that my health problems was not due to the causes which my parents and the paediatricians initially thought. I found out for example that I had a genetic condition affecting my lungs which is quite commonly misdiagnosed as asthma. I was still taking a cocktail of drugs to help me breathe properly and now, I had a few more. One of the drugs I took made my hair fall out almost immediately. I still remember the day I sat down in front of my mother while she brushed my hair. I heard her panicked cry when clumps of long black hair started falling unto her lap. The doctor reckoned that it was because of the steroids which I had been taking that was supposed to help me breathe better. My fluctuations in weight didn’t help either and I often missed classes at college.

 

Then one day, disaster struck. I woke up to find that I had turned yellow.

 

Jaundice.

 

My liver started to play up. For reasons I have forgotten, my liver simply started to give up. The doctors reckoned that it was that cocktail of drugs that took its toll on me. Already since a child, I have been exposed daily to Longifene, Ventolin tablets, steroid inhalers and Intal. Come to think of it, I was probably the only kid on the block who could tell you that QVar tastes a lot different to Becotide. Not to mention all the other stuff I was taking to keep my hormones in check.

 

I was out of action for several months . My weight plummeted yet again I was literally a skeleton, subsisting only on a tiny pot of coleslaw a day and Livita. And just like before, my parents stopped giving me a hard time about studies and began really looking after me. Again, after a very long time, I felt loved. I went to hospital after hospital and I think my dad spent a fortune in medicines.

 

I felt that I was something precious to them.

 

And for the second time in my life, I felt the strong link between being sick and love.

 

Sardhana and I grew apart during the time I was sick. I could not cope with my lessons on account of me being very weak. I did get invited to her birthday party early that year and I tried my best to look healthy for it. I think that day was the start me distancing myself from her. I bought a simple gift that day and with flowers I went to her house. I was of course very conscious of the way I looked and as I noticed that night, everyone loved her. For some reason and I think this was due to the fact that I saw myself as sickly, I saw everyone else in a better position than I. I saw people who didn’t have to take pills everyday, didn’t have to watch what they ate and more importantly didn’t get beaten by their parents for being less than par. I saw parents hugging their kids and being told that they were proud of their achievements. To make matters worse, she introduced me to her ‘boyfriend’ and spent the whole night in his arms. My carefully wrapped roses lay discarded at the bottom of a staircase.

 

I suppose it wasn’t really jealousy I felt that night for I never saw anything romantic between me and her. I was still rather confused to what I was and how I felt. All I know was that I didn’t feel something about myself. And when I got home to face more coughing fits I went to the bathroom to wash myself up. I took a long look in the mirror and without thinking twice, I cut my wrists. I wanted it to end there and then. But it wasn’t deep enough.

 

I even failed at that.

 

So, with the time at home, we grew apart. I did of course fail a paper that year and had to retake it twice before I passed. Parental admonition was severe but controlled. The hitting stopped. I think by that time I was doing more damage to myself than they could ever do. I already wasn’t eating properly, self-harming and constantly denying myself the pleasures of my age. I stopped going out and socialising and spent most of my time indoors.

 

The something amazing happened. I got accepted into law school. Apparently my grades were marginally good enough. My parents decided that law was definitely going to be my vocation and I really had no say in the matter.

 

I wasn’t really prepared for the intensity of law school and university for that matter. Not only that, with my esteem already low and me being almost constantly ill I was rushing headlong into a full blown eating disorder.

 

It was the year 1991 I discovered my love affair with bulimia and laxatives.

 

Done