It's time...to say...that I will... xxx

Time. Such a short, plain, simple little word. But yet, those four little letters, in all their simplicity, point to a meaning representative of one of the most powerful and inevitable forces at work in the modern world. A force so palpable, so central to our existence; something around which the every human based society and community resolves and rotates; an entity so familiar, but yet, so mysterious. And so infinitely and inevitably transient.

As swift and as fleeting as a swallow on the wing, flitting across an autumn sky ablaze with the fiery colours of sunset; as transitory, and as short-lived, as the tender-skinned bud upon the quivering hawthorn tree, which no sooner than having emerged from the cruel, icy grip of winter's pitiless fingers, has blossomed and bloomed into the glorious, sweetly scented, dainty pink flowers of summer, overflowing and abundant in their unconstrained, unadorned, and flawlessly natural beauty.

Time, and life...so fleeting, so short. So..precious.

It's hard to believe just how much things can change, in the space of a single year.

January, 2014.

Recovery wasn't even on my mind, that winter...I was at home, miserably ruminating about the next term that awaited me at college, desperately yearning for the beautiful, idyllic days of the Christmas holidays to not pass me by so quickly. I didn't want to go back. I didn't want to have to leave home, again. Go back to that place where I would be left free to my own devices; where I would e able to restrict, without any interference whatsoever. But I knew that I had to, and that I would, like the alcoholic who knows that drinking is the last thing on earth she should be doing, but goes ahead and does it, anyway. I knew that I would.

January, 2015.

Exactly a year ago now.

It felt, during that winter, the winter of the year in which I had first committed myself to recovery - I do have an eating disorder, I know that I should change, I can change, I am going to fight. I can recover...I have to try... only then to be officially diagnosed with anorexia at the latter part of the year, and to be told that, due to the severity of my mental and physical state, hospitalisation was essentially inevitable and obligatory - as if my whole world had been destroyed.

Everything I loved, everything that I knew, everything that I held dear, was going to be taken away from me. And all because of that...that thing, that thing which I hated, hated with all my body and heart and soul, but yet to which I still desperately clung to; despite the burning intensity of that hatred that would set fire to my veins and bring angry, hot, bitter tears to my eyes every time I heard its name; everytime I was enabled to recognise its cruel,remorseless, malicious, heartless voice. ED. And despite everything which had happened to me, everything which it had taken away from me...to it, I still held on. It was the white-knuckled grip of a drowning girl, lost and alone in a roaring, crashing, monstrous ocean: the ocean, which I now saw as the world which I knew: a world capable of such beauty and sublimity, but which could also be so hostile, so unpredictable, so cruel. And Ed was...that jagged, slippery, treacherous rock, to which I clung to with my bare hands as the waves crashed around me, soaking me to the bone. And that rock was tearing my hands as I clung to it: leaving me torn and broken and bleeding. but yet, I still held on. I wanted...to let go. But I could not. To let go...I didn't believe I would be able to make it to the shore. ED was still part of me.

.January, 2016...

And yet another year has passed me by.

Once again, things are different. 2015 was hard, so hard. But even harder than the actual hospitalisation itself, even harder than the pain of knowing that what I did to try and recover in 2014, was not quite enough to beat my eating disorder...even harder than that was having to accept that, despite everything which they put me through in that place, 2015 was not the year in which I was able to break free from my eating disorder.

But it's a new year and a new January. And I want to make this my year.

Because life is, after all, so, so short. So short, so transient, so easily thrown away, forever. To me, it seems as if the past ten years of my life have just slipped away from me, passing through my fingers like the finest, tiniest grains of sand. Ten years, trapped and imprisoned, enslaved by a tyrannical, malign, oppressive, malignant force. A force made even the more terrifying, by the fact that it was, essentially, a Voice: a Voice which dwelt deep inside, deep inside my very own Head.

In January 2014...a girl did not know that there was a recovery.

A few months later...she said, I know I have to give this a try.

In January 2015, that girl said I want to recover...

But I don't know if I have the strength, to make it to the beautiful shore, on the other side.

And the months passed and the days slipped away, and as the darkness fell she cried out again...I can't do it. I can't and won't recover.

But in January 2016, that girl said...I can, and will, recover...

Because that girl realises now, that she is running out of time.