Jessica Matyas

Jessica Matyas Feb 2014

i. I am sixteen years old, with an increasingly curved spine and blood so thick it doesn't reach my fingers and shoulders so weak they fall apart at the slightest pressure, much like I do at the mention of your name.

ii. You see, when I was six years old I may have been a toothpick girl but at least I was healthy and the first time I remember feeling like maybe my body wasn't quite right was when your smile first touched mine.

iii. These things get worse with time and I think that's why I was so determined I was never in love with you, why now it's gotten to the point where I can remember the bruises your words left and I can't help but miss them because you left a part of yourself in me, somewhere under my tongue or in the base of my skull where I fear I will never be able to get it out.

iv. It's been nearly three years since I first felt the brand of your name on my heart and I guess I'm a slow cooker because it's just now that I'm realizing that even if it never could have worked, what I was trying to convince myself was puppy love was most likely full-fledged and strong and unlikely to ever appear in my life again.

v. Who else will write me love letters in different pens so I could read the color coded poems you hid in them? Who else will call me, drunk and fifteen years old and crying because you've let me down?

vi. I'm not sure I will ever be able to remove your touch from my wrists or my cheeks even though the skin you touched is just thousands of dust particles by now. Your touch is scattered on the air I breathe and perhaps that's why I can't escape you.

vii. Perhaps that's why my body is broken; it's to make up for when my heart never was.

journal entry 2-13-14

Jessica Matyas Jan 2014

Unoriginal

I am not an original and that is exactly my problem. I fall in love with types of people I've never seen before, people with interesting names and scars and stories, people whose eyes or hair or hands are unforgettable, people who speak and leave their words stamped onto the edges of your ribs and the tissues of your brain, people who are so unapologetically who they are that it's impossible not to be intoxicated by them. And I am. Intoxicated, I mean. I meet these people and become fixated on the way their necks flow into their shoulders and the way their knuckles are scarred from the kind of accomplishments I will never know and the way that they are so different from anything I know. I meet these people, so many of them, and at the end of the day I lie on my floor trying and failing not to fall apart because I can't get them out of my system and I will never be in theirs. They are so unapologetically who they are, and I apologize for every word that comes out of my mouth and every gesture I make. When I was younger I just wanted to be accepted, so I tried so hard to be like everyone else and now that I want to be my own person, I can't. I am a repeat of every song I have ever heard, an echo of every word ever said to me, a copy of every book I have ever read. I am walking plagiarism, and that fact of my existence is what causes me to tear myself apart in a useless effort to build myself up to something new.

Jessica Matyas Jan 2014

This is Dumb pt. 3

this is dumb
and I am dumb
but I can't stop thinking about you
and it's ridiculous because I will
never know the feeling of
your collarbones under my fingertips
or the heat of your cheek close to mine
and it's masochistic to continue letting
these dreams fill my head but
your smile makes it better and
though you'll never let me be yours
I can't convince myself
to stop thinking of you as mine.

Jessica Matyas Dec 2013

I Am Not Laughing

I'm sitting in the library before school,
talking and laughing like any other day
when you reach over and pick up
a book on overcoming anorexia.

You hold the nonthreatening orange-and-purple cover in your hands
that I once thought were gentle
and scoff, saying, "People with anorexia are so stupid."

Our friends sitting around us agree
and laugh and joke about it
while I sit in mute horror and suppressed panic
and dig my fingernails into my skin
until someone asks
why I'm not laughing.

Why am I not laughing?

I am not laughing at the disease
that consumed my life for nearly a year,
that ripped and clawed its way into my mind
and through my veins
like an addiction,
like a freight train gone off the tracks,
out of control and spinning
and uprooting everything crucial and meaningful
and burying it it flames,
turning it to ashes.

I am not laughing
at the nights I spent crying
and hating myself
while I felt the lining of my stomach
try to consume itself
in a poor replacement of the
sustenance I was denying myself
while I again dug my fingernails into my skin,
pins holding a dead butterfly
to its morbid display.

I am not laughing
at the thoughts that constantly filled my head
of death and disaster and pain
of wishing them upon myself
of making them happen
of letting myself shrink
and shed the space
that I believed I did not deserve to occupy.

I am not laughing at the thoughts
that after two years still plague me-
is my stomach sticking out?
do you really deserve breakfast?
your thighs are too big
your hips too wide
I count fewer ribs each day
you are fat
fatfatfatfatfatfat
worthless fat useless fat pathetic fat
you deserve to die
fat.

I am not laughing
at my choice
of slow suicide
that I made the
agonizing choice
to save myself from.

I am not laughing
at the book that I myself read
at every torturous bite of food I took
at every painful step of recovery.

I am not laughing
because I will not take away
every moment I felt strong for not relapsing,
every prayer I pled
every tear I shed,
every time I decided that I did not want to die
anymore.

I am not laughing.
I am leaving.

journal entry 12/5/13

Jessica Matyas Dec 2013

142 Potential perfections

i have 79 freckles on my body
and 63 scars
and i'm waiting to find the person
who will love them all the same

freckles mean a lot to me and so do scars, they're both interesting and all have a story

Jessica Matyas Dec 2013

Pattern

it's a terrible pattern we've fallen into:

i tear my heart open
hoping that you will do the same
and am only met with disdain
in your light eyes that hold more darkness
than i'd ever like to know

or I beg you to look at the stars with me
but you just turn your head
and close your lavender eyelids
in a childish move to spite me
in the ways you know it will

when i smile at you
you look away

and that's how i know
you never meant to stay

fake friends are the worst
also, I **** at titles

Jessica Matyas Dec 2013

Are and Aren't

I'm obsessed with other people's hands
because they're beautiful
and maybe it's because mine aren't.

It's the same way that I look at other girls' legs
and noses and teeth and shoulders
and spines and fingernails.

It's the same way that I watch sunsets and snow and starlight and street lamps
and fireflies and clouds and storms.

it's the same way I love you.