my surname means "him" but it also means strength, it means tenderness in the face of adversity, it means unravelling the knots he tied in me, it means that i no longer flinch at the sound of his voice, it means that i can speak my own name without shivering, it means that i will be me and only me and not at all him and absolutely, incredibly me forever and though he has tried to unload the burden of his own suffering upon me i will bear no weight of his

my body is a hotel full of guests who do not pay their bill
room 1 houses a boy who wraps his hands around my throat as he asks about my father
whispers from next door ask him if he is really afraid to die
they seem to come from inside the foundations of the building
and his upstairs neighbours are always banging on the floor in the hopes that he will notice them
my walls want to cave in on themselves
and the dining room is always full of monsters
bathroom drains clogged with hair and ****, pipes moaning in fear
i am filling up and it is terrifying
a sick, sick man is squatting in the basement
all of my residents know, but nobody says anything
out of politeness or fear
until it is too late, until
he has breathed his infection into the air
then transferred into the lungs of my occupants
using me as a conduit

sometimes i feel like the hours in my days are measured not in units of time, but in calories, minutes to my next meal, and hunger pangs.

there is a room in my mind
in which the clocks are made of mirrors,
detailing the time that it will take for my rib bones to make waves beneath my fingers,
for the corners of my elbows and my shoulders and my wrists to poke out from inside of my skin.

this is where i curl up to hide,
taking part in a ****** up form of transcendental meditation
in which my only mantra is an endless repetition of the reasons why i should not eat.

'you eat to live, you don't live to eat,' i chant,
running my fingers over my flesh and digging into the too-shallow hollows of my bones.

you look at me with laughter in your eyes and tell me that everybody feels like this, but i refuse to believe that everyone's body feels like a prison made of heavy bones and aching joints.

and if everybody feels like i do then, ****, i don't know what to do, because at least if i tell myself that i am all alone then i can pretend that i may someday be someone else with the bones of a sparrow and a tongue that doesn't try to tie itself into knots when it hasn't had enough to taste.

my voice won't stop creaking and i can't remember what i really sound like anymore,
and when you tell me i seem jumpy i have to pinch at my calves to try and stop my hands from shaking.

how am i supposed to get better at this when the only things that make me want to stay alive are the numbers on the scale and the space between my thighs?

a month ago i swore off of
loneliness,
promising myself i would love only myself.
the antithesis of isolation is not relation, it is
reciprocation
that which it hurts to not receive
that which fills up my empty spaces with dull aching
hollowing my body from the inside-out,
making room for pain and fear and self-indulgence you
abandon to carry inside of me.

a man tells me that i must not eat and i bite off my own tongue and swallow it / a boy tells me not to use my teeth and i bare them in a grin as i sink them in