I seem to reward myself for bad behavior, and while others don’t understand it to be bad, it gnaws at me. Grows like a tumor, because even if an accident, or happenstance, I still seem to shrink, but not before my body rebels and solidifies into making me gorge on fiber until I lose the nerve and rush to other means. I’m not supposed to do it on purpose, not like Lori, and I hold myself back, convinced that my weight-loss is not an extension of my personality, but I cant help but admit I’m obsessed with the scale. Obsessed with an anti-me. My therapist doesn’t see the pattern, and maybe she is right, but I am too busy worrying about becoming obsessed that I have become obsessed with being obsessed. A hundred and seven pounds, and I have had to seriously fight to control myself not to create harm, and when my stomach doesn’t seem to want to let go of food after days, I can’t help but go to my medicine cabinet, find the laxative, and let my body suffer in such an embarassing way.

I watched Lori do it, and I swore I wouldn’t. But I am, even if for the sake of relief, of release. And I swear it’s not a habit, but that means nothing come every Monday when I have to be the beacon at the group weigh-ins, to mark some kind of false sense of hope for others. They call me an inspiration, and even if not intentional, I feel like I have been cheating.

My grandfather asks me every time I tell him about my weight-loss, “Are you sure you aren’t hurting yourself?” and I am reminded of the decades of humiliation he wrought upon me due to my obesity. What right does he have to ask of harm when he helped drive me to four hundred and more pounds? Maybe this is punishment for all the times his words cut deep enough to make me keep eating in anguish. Maybe I’ll just keep losing long after I hit my goal until there is nothing left– not even dust to be carried along with the wind.

Thoughts like that make me worry that it has evolved from lifestyle change to pure, unadulterated obsession. The kind I have seen time and time again.

My family has always been riddled with addicts.

I forget how to breathe sometimes,
and every inhale becomes a gasp,
like my heart may stop
if I can’t control the rise and fall
of my chest.

I often count to ten, let my mind relax
between each breath and each number.
The calm is like invading sleep
as it creeps over my numb limbs,
and I wonder as my mind wanders,

is this what dying feels like?
Or is this simply the moment
we accept an outcome
we’re always too afraid
to attempt to comprehend?

Maybe I’m the paradox, a reality defying kind of ephemeral, something who stands before but beyond window view.

That’s why you can’t grasp me, I’m more phantom than logic, more feeling than reason, and I think it’s fair assessment

upon my desire to remain rooted. So impossibly the oak stands resolute, a fixture in the howling hurricane, beheld

to the wind, the debris, and the weeping. I have had time to adapt, to grow, to find alternatives, and I stay among concrete

and fettered notions. The truth is, I can wither and curl, or strain to break my hold upon the earth and walk until my last leaf falls.

But what am I without the wind in my branches, and the shade above my roots? What am I without the song you gift me

and the growth you’ve supplied? How dare I entertain an idea of a lack of you when I hold you so dear? Storms shake trees,

but that means nothing when your sun shines– that means nothing for all the good you’ve birthed, even if you can’t fathom

how my limbs reach toward you still.

Katelyn has this intensity
I can only describe with her eyes
As they focus on mine

Almost feral
When rhythm pulsed, and she took
My palm in hers

Pulling me from seat to floor
As bodies rocked around us–
I thought it might be her eyeliner

Or the smoke drifting between us.
Maybe I was the focus, or the idea
Kept within alcoholic ferver,

While I was mid answer
To her question, held in the pause
Of her sway, of her strut, of her

Break, reach, pivot, and turn.
My hand rest upon her waist
Yet I felt her control,

Leading me from anxiety
To something a little less
Hesitant.

I asked my mother once,
What would you have done if I was born a girl?

She offered a name she considered,
but not the blessing—-
not the consideration that maybe,
just maybe,

I wasn’t supposed to be
quite like this.

We say crazy with endearment
like the word itself is more sane
than sanity, more full

than lips locked– and I imagine
our kind of crazy lacks diagnosis–
and I like living in anomaly

indefinable and unreasonable.
But it’s a crazy I can cherish,
not some schoolboy fantasy

tucked within folded notes
passed along rows of textbook
denotations– no, I want you

and your connotations, and
every avalanche caused
through our tangled crazy.

I want you something crazy–
we can be two sheets, wind
be ******– and I’ll be ******

if I ever knew a better place
to feel so steady than right here–
right next to crazy,

your crazy I love.

I’ve got a lot of demons,
and personally,
I’m just waiting to be exorcised
by some no-name street-priest
wearing a ski-mask--
wielding their Almighty God

with point blank accuracy.