Deirdre From Sorrow

This story is about a young girl with an eating disorder who contemplates suicide.

Freezing tile. Knees bruising against the cold porcelain. There’s more, there’s more. Get it all out.

Deirdre—always cold at fourteen—shivered, her teeth chattering, her bones heavy, brittle, and agonizingly visible beneath skin stretched too tight over stark ribs. The voice inside her head grew louder, relentless. Not enough. Never enough.

Through the window, she watched her sisters, Brigid and Tara, laughing, moving, simply living. She tried to stand—black spots instantly bleeding across her vision as the room spun wildly. Her legs felt like lead, frozen and useless. A hollow, starving ache replaced the air in her lungs. She reached for the black book. Her pen shook violently as she forced the numbers onto the page: 145. 120. 0. Stop the spinning. Control the numbers. Keep control. Keep control. Just breathe.

November 2

Click. The brass lock on the upstairs bathroom door—a heavy, metallic knob she had memorized by heart. "I need to use the loo," Brigid yelled from the hall.

Deirdre froze, then turned the water on full blast, trying desperately to drown out the sound. Brigid banged twice on the door before stomping downstairs.

A few minutes later, the door creaked open, and a heavy cloud of Chanel No. 5 drifted into the hallway. Thick. Cloaking. Sickly sweet over the sour, burning stench of gastric acid. Her mother thought the perfume hid it; she thought her daughter didn’t know the exact sequence of her ghosts. But Deirdre saw the truth. She saw her mother's collarbones—sharp, far too sharp beneath an oversized wool sweater. She watched the way her mother handled dinner, moving the food in silent, geometric patterns around her plate, never swallowing a single bite. A generational curse, passed down like an heirloom. Is this my future? Am I just rewriting her history?

May 3

Six months of a slow-motion car crash. Tonight, dinner was a complete disaster. Chicken and rice. To her distorted, starved vision, it looked like gravel and smelled like sulfur. Her throat locked up, tight and suffocating. She couldn't swallow. Sweat dripped down her neck as her heart hammered—boom, boom, boom—right against her bruised ribs, panic breaking out across her skin.

She looked at Mom. Silent. Tears tracked down her mother's face, hitting her plate like rain. But they weren't just tears for her daughter; they were tears of raw recognition. Her mother saw herself trapped in her own prison, and she was terrified her daughter had built the exact same one. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. What have I done?

It didn’t take long before Brigid shook her head in disgust, and Tara murmured, "Mom, why don’t you let me clear the table?"

Sick to her stomach, vertigo spinning her vision, Deirdre remembered what the therapist had said: choose recovery every hour. Every hour? How? Her head felt like it was exploding with noise. She was terrified of the weight, but equally terrified of becoming her mother's ghost. If she kept this up, they would only be two hollow echoes haunting this house forever. Maybe it’s my fault that Mum is like me?

Deirdre walked out into the shadows of the evening, a heavy, suffocating conviction whispering that perhaps her mother would get better if she were simply gone. Looking at her every day must make it impossible for her mother to feel good about herself. Her frail body was living proof of a mother's failure.

***

She drifted toward the busy intersection at the edge of town, mesmerized by the fast-moving lights, the hypnotic screech of rubber against asphalt—the steady city rhythm calling to her, begging her to join in. But then, a soft, whimpering chirp brushed against her ankle.

Pulling her eyes away from the asphalt, she looked down and saw a scraggly-haired, impossibly bony little dog begging for attention. It looked like Hachiko from the movies, but desperately thin.

"Where did you come from, little one?" Deirdre asked, sinking to her knees. "Come here, you can’t go into the street."

She scooped up the trembling weight and carried it back to a bench. There was no collar. "You sure are a mess, and you look like you haven’t eaten in days. What should I do with you?"

Carrying the dog home, she felt the stark tightness of skin holding its small bones together—a feeling she knew down to her marrow. She couldn’t let this little creature continue to waste away. Such a precious little life. I’ll call you Shauna.

The little dog was so weak it had difficulty chewing. Deirdre tried some dog kibble borrowed from a neighbor, but Shauna couldn't manage it. So, she tried softer food. Taking a piece of buttered bread in her fingers, she pressed it gently to Shauna’s lips. When the dog struggled, Deirdre demonstrated, putting small pieces to her own lips, showing Shauna how to open her mouth and swallow.

Deirdre’s stomach twisted into knots. One bite. Gagging, she forced it down. Two bites. Her chest grew tight, gasping for air as her hand shook. But she continued—for Shauna.

Within a couple of weeks, Shauna was eating better. And little by little, Deirdre began eating tiny pieces of whatever she was feeding the dog. The small bites no longer made her gag. She was too focused on seeing Shauna gain weight, watching her skin smooth and her bones grow stronger. She even began feeding her at dinnertime with whatever the family was eating, sampling it herself before sharing it with Shauna.

August 21

More than a year since she had started this black notebook. The park was quiet tonight, the sun sinking low. Her skin tingled—not with the old, deadening numbness, but with an actual, living warmth.

Before going to the park with Shauna, Deirdre’s mother sat with her on the porch. There was no commentary on her body, no forced plates pushed across a table. Just the warmth of conversation, and for the first time, her mother's grip felt stronger than the sickness. Her mother was still struggling, still fighting her own ghosts—she could still hear that bathroom door lock click shut sometimes—but she was looking at her daughter differently now. Not as a mirror reflecting her own failure, but as a map leading out of the maze.

Recovery wasn't a neat line; it was blood, sweat, and tears. But the panic attacks were less severe and rarely occurred.

The black notebook felt heavy in her lap. Pages of poison. Thousands of numbers. Cruel rules written in a frantic, self-inflicted hand. A cage built of ink. Her fingers trembled, but it wasn't the old panic—it was adrenaline, sharp and urgent. She refused to let her mother's past define her forever.

With a deep, steadying breath, she stood up. She walked over to the deep recycling bin near the exit, her heart hammering a strong, healthy rhythm. She opened her fingers and let go of the notebook. She watched it drop into the darkness below, the pages fluttering like dying moths, swallowed by the dark as she finally stepped out into the fading, golden light with Shauna trotting at her feet.

She was breathing air with her own lungs.