My precious, gracious Ana
Who caters to me with her understanding
Then cancels the catering.

(You violate my thoughts with your lies,
Yet I, the powerless, am responsible.)

How gracious you are to me today
Allowing me an apple
Carefully constructed
From artificial ruins
In a bowl of fake fruit
And candy shine
Beckoning, beckoning…

“To gaze upon, only.” you say
“Your skin folds over like the waves in a tide;
I’m here to calm the waters if you so decide
So trust me
And I will make you free.
And one day you’ll be good enough.
Without measure.”

And sure enough, I took a stroll outside
And Ana forbid me
To gaze upon the apple tree
(The same one I used to climb
In younger days when weight was just a number
And I hated Math.)

My eyes fell towards it manically
As Ana screamed softly to me,
Gently, gently…
“You will binge! Don’t you dare!
You’re a flood of imperfection
And soon no one will care!”

I didn’t listen and caught sight of an apple
Deliciously, devilishly calling to me.
Oh how desperately I wanted to cling
To climb, reach, to be
Something more than this hopeless figure
Drenched in ***** and obsession and diuretics,
But alas who the hell would I be
Without the sickness to define me?

I lick my fair apple, observing its roundness,
It’s greenness, forbidden smell, engaging—spell—
And almost sunk a tooth through its nearly broken
Skin.
Oh how deliciously devilish I felt.

Then I puked off the air I’d consumed
(Infested by calories—nature)
With hours of running and fainting,
Though I should have done more.

So I daydreamed about that fair apple,
Absorbing fact and true fiction encased in mere fantasy.
I stutter and sell my thoughts to Ana’s.

“I knew you were right.
Why didn’t I listen?
Where I thought I would glow
I don’t even glisten
And my mirror is a magnifying
Glass, they tell me,
But it sure doesn’t show
Much more than
Ugly—Mistakes.

I enter my bedroom, exhausted, depressed,
Dodging all phone calls from former dumb friends
Expressing their “worries”,
“You’re not well. You’re too thin.”
While thinking up ways
To sabotage me.

I must stay thin. Silent. Beautiful.
Ill yet immune to all men and desire,
Apathetic to cries all around me,
Withholding each urge now to scream.
(Please help me.)
That apple almost murdered me