I’ve always had a fascination with bones. The skeletal system was taught to me in my fourth grade year. I learned the name of each bone that laid just under my thin layers of skin. I read books on how they were made, how they were broken, how they fixed themselves. I saw them as self-sufficient. I gazed at the plastic skeleton that lived in the corner of my classroom. I tried to match his bones with mine. ******* in my stomach to pinpoint each individual rib. Stretching my skin to watch the edges of my bones appear. I remember narrowing my eyes at the plastic toy in front of my face. It was like he was mocking me. He was showing me everything I wished I could see on myself. Staring at me with such contemptuousness in a sneer of his plastic teeth. I walked away in a mood that rivaled a hurricane, tears that felt foreign against my soft cheeks and a boiling pool of disgust deep inside my body that was covered in too many layers of skin.

I spent my first two years of middle school in quiet distaste. I forgot my fascination with the bones inside me. I never quite existed anywhere but in my own head. I was content. When my father pushed us away the first time, we fled to a different home on a different street. The second time, he shoved us into a different house in a different state. I started a new school with new people that inhabited new sets of bones. In my biology classroom, another plastic skeleton took up home in the corner. I went back to my new house everyday to my mother who I only saw once a day if I went to seek her out and sisters who had to take the blows silently. I trailed behind them, gathering their missing pieces and using the glue holding me whole to stick their parts back together. I scrambled to feed the zombies wandering around my house, shaving off layers of skin. I had to stand by and watch my own body turn into the skeleton I envied. I could peel back the skin I had left and finally see the sharp edges of milky bone.

We were pushed again. To another house in another state. I panicked to hide what was festering inside my chest. I tried to shield it from the eyes of my sisters, trying to keep them pure from fear of death or something just as scary. I pulled a veil down over my face, building a wall between the people I loved and myself. I watched as girls my age twisted and smiled and matured. I felt uneasiness as I tried to be like them, taking note of the way they flicked their hair back and tried to replicate it in a mirror. I painted my face with powders and rimmed my eyes in black to cover the red. I grew out my hair long enough to cover the bones trailing down my back, trying to bend in a shape that I didn’t want them going. I spent nights trying to find something that could bring my bones to life. I danced around death, grinning like a maniac when I dipped my toes into the ******* I had found. I watched the blood drip from the cracks in my skin as I stared by at my own face that looked like a ghost to me now. I didn’t recognize the person in the mirror. With white around their nose, red around their eyes and with features almost parallel to the skeleton that had mocked me so long ago.

I came back from myself in the months following. I tried to rip off the veil over my eyes. I worked to carefully dismantle the wall between me and everyone else. I let my skin grow and grow until I couldn’t see the bones I used to find beautiful. I let myself dress how I knew I wanted. I let myself be who I wanted. I took the pain I had nurtured in my chest since I was a child and bundled it up, pushing it away because it was a friend I didn’t want to be around anymore. I had to learn how to hold my sisters up and climb up with them too. I started scribbling a new name on the canvases I have poured my heart into. I stopped trying to carve my own bones into the shape I wanted them to be and instead, I painted the way they grew. I molded creatures out of clay. I drew beautiful things. I made beautiful things. I began only drawing the things I saw most beautiful. I drew flowers and animals and the people I had allowed to help me. I drew architecture and waterfalls and insects. After my bones had disappeared and the smile on my face wasn’t pulled up by the thought of being non existent, I drew myself too.