The heat your cold body brought mine made my insanity run off and hide. to watch your body sway under to hot lights in the gloomy night. oh you painted my being with love. i like to think your brown eyes were mesmerized by my blue ones. the memories of your blonde hair spread out on the pavement sting in my mind. you smelled of daisies. my cigaret buds contrasted against the grass in your backyard. i knew we only had paper thin chances to live on. our luck was bending and breaking. our hope was afraid.

Yet you saved me from myself, even when you were dying.

Nobody knows
They can't tell my pain
They can't see my tears
They won't feel my hunger
They won't notice until I fade away

Excuses.
My life is built on them
Excuses and lies.
My mind is full
Yet my stomach is not

Who would know?
That happy girl,
That chubby, happy girl
She's crying inside
There's a disease in her mind
She's struggling
I'm struggling.

I'm too far gone

Listen:

You cannot give back what you stole from yourself. You can’t feed your body the things you denied it while it was quivering beneath the whip of your merciless, perfectionist dysmorphia, or erase the scars you’ve carved into it, or stroke it tenderly all those times you wished you could jump out of your flesh and become somebody else—a goddess-girl, a radiant impossibility, angelic fire with taut skin over crystal cheekbones and a torso so trim it could snap in a storm.

But you can start again. You can make vows to yourself that you will spend the rest of your life fulfilling, because to hell with comparison. To hell with the wars waged on magazine racks. To hell with GET SKINNY IN 3 WEEKS and HOW TO TIGHTEN YOUR ABS and 10 TIPS THAT WILL MAKE HIM WANT YOU. To hell with the mythology of thin—this vile word, this grotesque title, this dismissal of your vibrant heart and humming brain, this slaughtering of your entirety. To hell with the numbers that made you ill. To hell with calories/ scales/ grams/ portions, the formulas that stabbed you and wrecked you and violated you in ways so wicked you still cannot breathe them aloud. To hell with it all.

All this time you have been confused by yourself, thinking it ugly, despicable, criminal. All your life you have suppressed the sunburst inside you. Now, it’s time to release the latch. Time to push the lid open. Time to make whatever noise you were never bold enough to make, because none of it matters, you know? Size and measurement and all that soul-splitting *******. You are not bone or blood or cell; you are dizzy blue light and skipped heartbeats, the intersection of potassium and sodium, that chemical eruption of color, that running down unnamed streets amid stars and heavy breathing, that feeling of pushing through bodies of strangers to where there is the sweet negative space in the eye of it all, waiting for you to pull your hair off your face and dance like you are waterfall upon waterfall come to life.

You are not an equation. You are not pounds and inches. You are breath and sight and noise and movement and growth, and you cannot squander another pounding of your sweet, open-palm heart loathing your body for the misdeed of not being something else. The extra flesh protecting your vital organs is irrelevant when all the world is an electrical impulse roaring its beauty for you. The precise width of your hips is immaterial here in this place where sleepless people are kissing and comets are screaming through the atmosphere like fallen gods and tomorrow is unfurling in great, glittering swaths of potential.

I want to remember
what it feels like
to see my bones
reaching the sky
while i'm stuck in
this rotten pit bottom.

Trying to feel the thinness of air,
Running through your fingers like silk
Gently pushing around you in a soft embrace
Intangible tendrils wisping around your face
Ever present,
And forgotten

I see a girl
Looking at me
She looks so pale
So white
Her eyes are shining
So wide
She looks so thin
Her ribs are showing
The bra looks loose
Hanging on her shoulders
Her hair ties back
Up in a messy bun
The girl looks at me
And I look at her
She looks so tired
She seems to be in pain
I feel so helpless
That I couldn't do anything
I reach out to touch her
She did the same
The cold hits my fingers
It's hard and solid
Realisation hits
Shock look upon her face
That girl
Is me

I’m a china doll…
With rounded hips,
And fluorescent lips,
I am still never “good enough”
. . .
But it's okay!
I won’t grow today!
I’ll lose another layer
. . .
People start to see,
What’s not enough to set me free
But, to only me,
I have to be,
What I saw years ago…
. . .
But I’m okay,
Cause that’s what I say
I’ll just lose another layer…
. . .
All I own
Are baggy clothes,
From all those
Who still can get “too big”
. . .
Thinning layers,
I’m running out
I’ve reached my final road.
Cause tags and walls
Can say so much,
But numbers say it all…

Put on your costume,
And throw on your mask.
You've got to fit in.
It's your life's only task.

Don't ever be yourself.
That's far too lame.
You're simply too strange.
Let's all be the same.

Cut slits in your arms,
And starve yourself thin.
No matter the cost,
You have to fit in.

No one cares about you.
Who cares about joy?
Just make sure you're pretty,
To get the right boy.

Listen to their taunts,
And correct your mistakes.
Pretend you are smiling,
Ignore the "small" aches.

And when you are done,
Just go find a rope.
For we live in a world,
Where no one can cope.