i was three when i realized something was terribly wrong, or at least that's the earliest of my life i can recall today.

i remember sitting in the house with my uncle for days on end, kept inside the crib the whole time, crying because i was so hungry. he would yell at me and tell me to shut up, and when my mother and father got home, they would feed me and never ask why i was so famished every time they got back. maybe they knew.

maybe they just didn't care.

i was four when uncle hit me for the first time and left a mark. he had hit my back with a belt and left me crying and howling on the floor. i still have a scar; i didn't show it to doctor min, but it's there.

the rest of my early childhood went much the same. my parents saw all of the little bruises that would occasionally bloom on my arms or legs or back, but they never said anything about them.

i was thirteen when i stopped eating.

fourteen by the time i could see my ribs and count them, fifteen by the time i could wrap my fingers around my arm and at that point i had a name for every visible bone on my body.

i tried to kill myself for the first time then too.

i was stupid with my first attempt: i remember pathetically dragging a kitchen knife across my arm and passing out from the blood, and then waking up in my bed with more bruises all over my stomach. i got hit again when my uncle found that i was awake.

i met jungkook when i was sixteen. he was fifteen and in the advanced math class with upperclassmen. he had little bunny teeth, which he still does, and a pretty smile and fluffy hair that bounced when he walked.

i met jimin because of jungkook, and we started to do this thing where we would sit around in an old, shady alley after school every other day and talk until midnight before going home.

i was sixteen when i also tried to kill myself again. i was a little smarter then, but still not smart enough because i took pills but i didn't take enough to die. i woke up outside on the front porch and threw up the second i opened my eyes from the pills i had taken.

and then i turned seventeen and i had my third suicide attempt. i almost did it that time. i was halfway done slicing my other wrist when jungkook managed to get into the bathroom stall.

he had hugged me and cried, and my heart still constricts every time i remember the shattered expression on his face.

but i attempted again anyways a few months later and i honestly thought i had made it.

i had managed to slit both wrists and down a whole bottle of pills, so i decided to say my goodbyes. i remember texting jimin one message and then texting another one to jungkook before losing consciousness.

i had woken up at one point when i heard yelling, and then i woke up again when the bathroom door was kicked down. jungkook and jimin had been crying, and they had whispered to me that everything would be okay. i passed out again a few seconds later, and woke up later in the hospital.

and then i met doctor min.

you'd think he'd be intimidating and scary, but he's actually really nice. i kind of like talking to him, even if it's frustrating sometimes.

he actually makes me feel like things could get better.

they probably won't though; the moon was always against me.

it would shine the brightest when i was at my worst, and shine the fullest when i was at my emptiest, starving and exhausted.

the moon is contradictory.

i'm going to try to live once i get out of here. they'll probably send me back home, but i'll leave as soon as i turn eighteen. no one in that place cares about me anyways.