She used to write poems about slitting her wrists

About monsters that did but did not exist

About band aids and stained paper towels

About grubby toilet seats and empty bowels

And well, now

She regret the scars

Fishing line trails out of them

Transparent until noticed

Then tangled and messy

Catching on hot sweaters in the summer

On the eyes of friends

Of her grandparents

She found them to no longer be the uneven lines of art she loved

She'd stick to colored pens

I am learning how to be a person again.

I am learning how to put food in my mouth again and
taste it.
how to eat (3 times) every day and
not to skip meals or
spit them out when I am
upset.

I am learning how to be a person again.

I am learning how to let myself feel again-
the good emotions and
the bad ones.
how to take the memories out from their locked trunk and
examine them,
turn them over and feel the sharpness of every
edge
to not run away
even when they bite.

I am learning how to be a person again.

I am learning how to not tear my skin apart when everything becomes
too
much.
how to not pick at old wounds and
make them new ones.
I am not very good at this one yet
but some lessons take more time to learn.

I am learning how to be a person again.

I am learning how to love again-
real love.
how to trust and
not to shake when your hands come near me
and not to make
excuses
for things that can never be excused
and how to take
the walls
down
slowly.

I'm sorry, but these words aren't going to spin a story from silver or light up stars in the sky
Sometimes, the poems just can't be beautiful

Beautiful is strange in that it has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with the pupils of your eyes
Like when I was little, I knew I was beautiful
Different beautiful than the other girls in my family-
Like a cherub with ringlet curls in the midst of hour-glass princesses-
But beautiful

I grew up a little and it had the opposite effect than you'd expect
Looking at my tall dancer friends somehow made me more stubbornly insistent that I was beautiful too
But differently, I noticed more now
More chest, more cheeks, all compacted into the rough shape of what a girl should be
So maybe more clasically pretty than a beauty

And then the depression, and then I lost weight
And for the first time, I could slide my hands up my sides and admit to myself that maybe they'd all been right
And that I'd been too fat and
Well, if anything good could come out of the depression it was that I was almost beautiful now,
Beautiful the way the world wanted me to be

And suddenly fear coiled around my throat, a viper paralyzing me with the idea that
I could easily fall back to before
A noose, for every time I tried to put food in my mouth

I started spending too much time by the mirror with my
shirt pulled up to my chest
So I could see the wedges of my ribs pushing through, like weeds cracking headstones at a cemetary
So I could run my hands over my collarbones and marvel at their solidity
Ignoring the cold cavern of my stomach and the shaking of my hands
Determining that 1200 calories a day was the recommendation to
lose weight at my short stature,
So I'd eat that, but somewhere in the back of my head it seemed simpler to round down to a thousand instead

You know what they say the difference between anorexia and dieting is?
They say that dieters have a goal in mind, a weight where they'll be happy whereas anorexics...
In my head, there was no goal, just less and less of me for the world to deal its deck of cards on
Because beautiful didn't matter any more and weightlessness was its replacement

I don't want to be like this
I wasted hours online, by the mirrors, shaking of cold and dizziness in my bed
I don't want to be like this
An alien structure of concavity and wasted bones the only end to this path
I refuse to be like this

I don't know if it works that way
But the laws of physics breakdown at some point anyway and so I will defy my own mind
I have watched this threat hurtle toward me, have seen it with through the pupils of my own eyes,
And it doesn't say very good things about my vision if I let myself be pushed to the side
A leaf ripped away by the wind

I will resist
I will feast on my fears
I will reclaim beautiful as my own, and project it, child-like, on every piece of my world

I refuse to be anorexic
And I will savor every taste of this life I can get
Before I die.

I drink the coffee every morning
Even though it makes my stomach uneasy
And my hands shake

I skip breakfast in the morning
And set precedent for the day
And the hunger aches

I do it anyway
There is something about rituals
In which I give more than I take

When?

When did you start limiting yourself?
Counting calories like they were a poison,
Eating nothing but crumbs
Until your cheekbones stick out like rocks under your pale skin

When did you start disposing yourself?
Purging your meals as if they were toxic waste,
While you ditch your food like an ugly prom date,
Flushing bits of your soul down with last nights meal

When did you start calculating?
Counting calories like you were taking a math test,
Subtracting and subtracting until there’s nothing left but
Your empty stomach and even emptier soul

So,
tell me when,
when did you start counting your ribs instead of your tears?