Sometimes you’ll have friends who you naturally aren’t so close with. Whether you don’t see on the same things on the same level, or you just are really different, it’s how things are. There was this girl that I knew that I was kind of close with. She was dating my brother for a short time and things got awkward. We went to the same summer camp one year and became very close then. This camp was in August. Unbeknownst to me, this girl had started to develop anorexia in March. She carried this burden all the way to camp, where things got worse with minimal supervision. She got home from camp and we were hanging out one time when she told me that she was diagnosed with anorexia. I am a person who always is eating, and offering my friends’ food, and to me, the condition of not eating does not make sense to me. I understand being an overeater, but not choosing not to eat. She kindly explained to me that she doesn’t really want to talk about food or anything, and I got sorta nervous that our friendship wouldn’t be the same ever again. But I was very wrong. Our friendship thrived. She let me get close to her, despite also being a little unemotional about things generally. We established a balance with what I was allowed to say and she was comfortable telling me when I was venturing into battlegrounds. She was going to this IOP- intensive outpatient care from 5:00- 8:00 and it seemed to be helping. She was very strong. But then her parents made the monumental decision to get divorced and it tore her apart, though she declined to admit it. The news threw off her eating. Then her parents decided they weren’t getting divorced, but she was still very stressed. She knew that it was better for the home and for her if they got divorced. And they once again decided they were going to. My friend was by then not eating at all, not even the sucking candies she had started to enjoy. She was put in inpatient care in a bloodless hospital. It was hard for her, and she had no communication with any of her friends. Before she went she sent me a text that said “I love you.” This girl was not comfortable in expressing her emotions, but she was feeling mushy before having her life taken away from her, and expressed that feeling to me. I felt like I was going to cry. By then, our friendship had developed into where we could talk about what it felt to be anorexic, and additionally we could talk about things that were plaguing me in my life. I knew that this was best but something inside me resented the fact that she had to be taking such extreme measures, forced or not. She was in there for a long hard week. I was not able to communicate with her. My friend, when she got out of inpatient, the first thing she did was flush the toilet, because she had not been able to do that herself in the hospital. She came to my house the next night and we talked for a long time about what rumors she had missed, and we laughed quite hard together. My girl. She was so strong. She had gone through alot and I was proud of the way she pulled through. She is still in an intensive morning till evening outpatient program, but in order to keep herself out of that horrible hospital, she is finally eating. It is hard for her, she feels weighed down, but she admitted she had more energy than she has had for a while. I watched her eat a Clif bar, previously to which she told me she doesn’t eat in front of most people. I guess that was a compliment or another expression of her love. While she was eating the bar, I had to ignore it because I could tell she didn’t want me to call attention. It took her a long while, but finally she finished. I was full of love at this girl with the hard life, the captivating smile, the dark, mysterious eyes, and that for everything she went to, she was learning to love. She was learning effects of her actions. She was growing up. I don’t know how responsible I was, but I felt like an effective mother, a master at parenting. My girl.