Nothing throws them off course for long; when they commit to their orbit, they commit for life.

It seems that no matter where I try to go, no matter how hard I try to escape, I will always have two bright moons circling around me.

Oh, the irony: waste away, and they look harder.

Why a zero? Why dizzy and unable to think?

To think is to focus. No food, no focus. No internal focus, no awareness of external focus.

With nothing happening inside, nothing can happen out.

Shrink yourself down to nothing and there'll be nothing left to focus on.

Treatment. A word I wish I could erase from my rear view mirror. We sat in the same melodramatic circle every damn day.

Holly distributed the Hunger-Fullness Continuum one afternoon during Meal Time Therapy to unravel our eating from our emotions, to reduce it to something purely physical.

0 - You are wobbly and dizzy. You can hardly think. Most people have to go all day without food to get close to being a 0.
1 - You are still very hungry. You are irritable and cranky.
2 - You are very hungry, on the verge of a starving feeling.
3 - You could definitely eat, but you're not on the verge of collapse. The urge to eat is strong.
4 - You are only a little hungry. Your body is sending you messages that you might want to eat.
5 - You're not hungry, but not satisfied just neutral. If you stop eating now, you will need to eat again in 1 to 2 hours.
6 - You are a notch past being neutral. You could definitely eat more.
7 - You are feeling more satisfied getting full. If you stopped here you would need to eat again in 4 to 5 hours.
8 - You are quite satisfied-full, in fact. If you stopped eating here, you wouldn't need to eat again until at least 5 to 6 hours.
9 - You are becoming uncomfortable. You could force down another three bites but your body no longer wants anything.
10 - Your body is screaming, get me out of here! This is no fun anymore. If you eat anymore, you will explode.

Everyone despised her; she was a dumb fucking bitch. We were all there because we valued being zeros so greatly that we were willing to die for it.

And so we battled with each other to be better zeros. In a day or two, the continuum was trashed.

Eating, sleeping, thinking, breathing (or not) a single focus is extreme and potentially very harmful.

Like light tunneled through a magnifying class, their focus, called love, burned a hole in me.

I burst into flames.

Of course I saw it coming, how could I not? Like a tapeworm it nibbled at my gut for years, until suddenly there came a point when the light came on too strongly, penetrated too deeply. If I didn't act quickly it would seep into my wormholes and tear me open from the inside out. I knew that fightin it would fuck with the orbits of others, that it would throw everything off course.

Still, I couldn't move. A deer on an unlit road, I was ready to hit the glare.

From behind a coffee-shop window, I once saw a golden retriever leaning out of a silver Chevy pick-up. His nervous sniffing and furrowed brow told me he detected a scent that excited him, one particular smell that he couldn't get enough of.

Ultimately, it was just his own odor being blown by the wind back up into his nostrils, but how could he be expected to know that? Me, on the other hand, I'm an evolved human. I knew. I knew...