Every day the pieces of you that still remain under my bed
crawl closer and closer to the front door
in an attempt to escape, unnoticed
and with one starving hand out the door
I ****** them up and drag them back to the home I've forced upon them
because I can't bear the thought of them dying in anyone's presence
other than my own.

we can't always follow our dreams, or our hearts for that matter. if we did we would all be walking around aimlessly, running into walls and sneaking up on ex lovers the way we beg them to do to us in our heads.

I remember when the clouds began to look like a vortex
Hovering above the trees
Ready to inhale anything in their path,
And I remember when the walls of my own bedroom
Started to feel like barricades
Secluding me from all the things
That made me feel anything at all,
And I remember my own voice
Passing quietly through the empty hearts
Of the ones I thought had been listening all along
And came hurling back toward me
Like a car spun out of control across wet asphalt,
And I remember when the only ones around
To keep me company
Were the echoes between my own skin and bones.

What a relief
That when you left
They followed close behind.

If I would have known you would **** me up this badly, I would have chosen a different locker on the first day of high school. I would have pulled away the moment you put your arm around me and asked me to hold your project from a ceramics class as you attempted to impress me, and succeeded. I would have never become friends with your twin sister. I would have never said yes when you asked me to prom, and I would have sat on my hands when you tried to hold them in the car on the ride there. I would have looked the other way when you kissed me afterwards. I would have said no when you asked me to be yours, and I would have told you I was busy before you came home with me the same day. I would have never said I love you, or agreed to meet you at that park at 4am in the first place. I would have never been seen with you by my neighbor, kissing on park benches in the rain, pretending we were the only ones left in the universe. I would have never let you get mad at me that way, when we screamed at each other outside the only house I’ve ever called home, when I couldn’t even make it inside before tears started falling from my face. I would have never had that water fight with you at the park that used to remind me of my childhood (now it only reminds me of you.) I would have never broken up with you, and gotten back together, and broken up with you, and gotten back together, and broken up with you, and still been in love with you but hidden it under someone else’s bed sheets. I would have never gotten high with you and forgotten all about him for those two short hours. I would have never talked to you on the phone like we used to, until I realized it was six o’clock in the morning and I had class at eight. I would have never listened to that song on repeat for weeks, even though I can’t stand reggae.
I would have never answered the phone when you called and told me you never wanted to speak to me again. I wouldn’t be sitting here, writing to your ghost, as if I would ever have the nerve to say this to your face.

I was sixteen years old when I effectively vomited for the first time. As my mother’s pasta and the words of a boy I thought loved me flooded my esophagus I grasped the cold sides of the toilet seat with sweaty palms and bitten down fingernails. I looked into the mirror as if my reflection had finally transformed into a wax figure I had been burning at for years and I knew it would never go back to its original form. I’d seen that look before, in girls wiping their lips in high school bathrooms, girls who wore baggy clothes and flinched when boys playfully poked at their stomachs, girls who put rocks in their pockets before being weighed at doctors’ appointments and covered up bruises over fragile bones with whatever makeup they could find in their mother’s drawer. I sit in health class as the teacher speaks of the dangers of eating disorders from a third person point of view and it seems as if the only sound anyone is hearing is the growling coming from my empty stomach. I stand up from a lunch table in the cafeteria and freeze at the words of a girl telling me I’ve gotten as skinny as my three month prematurely born best friend. I walk through the front door and immediately remove every piece of clothing that might weigh even an ounce and I step onto the scale with hopes of seeing my importance rise as the numbers fall but no one ever told me that I am worth so much more than 96 pounds.

I am nineteen years old and I am no longer drowned in a sea of panic when my father asks me what I've had to eat today. When my boyfriend glides his hands under my shirt and over the top of my waistline my head is not consumed by the thought that my stomach is not flat enough for his liking. I do not sit in class and think about the flesh of my thighs bulging from the holes in my jeans that a boy once told me looked like tumors under my skin.
Okay, there are days when the only one who knows I am my own worst enemy is the mirror and okay, I still politely insist that the lights be turned off before I let him touch me with satin fingertips and okay, I still have a way of instantaneously counting calories in my head the same way I counted on myself to stop years ago but
I only weighed myself once today.