This obsessive, compulsive hatred I have for myself. Every time sin passes from my lips into me. Disgusting. Unaccomplished. Unsuccessful. I should just starve. 

One time in a text message this one day almost two years ago you said this one thing that made me feel this one way and I liked it and so I said this one thing that I’m going to repeat now, you said “I can’t think of a nickname for you, how about I call you rae?” and I wanted to say something much sluttier like “You can call me whatever you want wink wink” but instead I said “Okay, call me rae”. 

It’s bearable. Now. I can live with this feeling, this feeling that I have that will always be with me. I take comfort in it. In knowing my heart is so strong. In knowing the truth. In having the certainty that you exist and that these things were or are real. I take comfort in that. It’s bearable. Unbearably bearable.

There once was a child bathed in amber. Golden, smoldering, amber, the color of fire, the color of orange glass layered over a flashlight. The color of the leaves that she laid in. But to her, they weren’t leaves at all, they were much too loud. Leaves were supposed to be soft and supple and green, lime, jade, green. And these were burning in the sunlight, too brilliant for her too brown, brown eyes to look at. So she didn’t look, she just laid down and decided that she was submerged in amber. Like a dinosaur. Like a fossil that you find, crystalized around a small prehistoric beetle. That was her, she was a doe-eyed mystical creature, too odd to be a little girl, too tall for her too round head, too loud for her too small mouth, too strange for her too small town. And so this creature-child spent her time rolling around in honey-colored leaves, burying herself under the piles she raked up, hoping they would harden and she could stay like that forever. A fossil. One day she nearly got her wish.

It was one too cold night, and her fiery bed became too glassy, too sapphire, cobalt, navy, glassy blue. But she stayed there, completely still buried in the leaves, which took on a ghostly color at this time of night. She’d never seen her world so dark before, so pointy and cold and dark. “Maybe this is it, maybe I’m turning into a fossil”. 

You lived, but somewhere else,
your presence touched others, ring upon ring,
and changed. Did you think
I would not change?

Sometimes the whole world crashes down around you and beats you into the ground. And sometimes it’s like that, except your not really any smaller, or flatter, or dustier than before because you were pretty beaten down and broken to begin with. So there you are with the weight of the world upon you and no one can even see the difference, see any more of a broken-hallow-bruised-raw person. It’s like you’re just covered up by everything else going on around you and it’s like you’re invisible. It was inevitable. You were going to be invisible because you grew so small and then you became even smaller one day like today maybe. And you became invisible. 

Have you ever felt that way?

Me too.

What if it was “I promise myself I’ll live in the middle of Times Square someday”?

My problem is that I got what I wanted. I’m here. I’m holding it. I’m sitting on it. I’m walking in it. I’m touching it and seeing it and breathing it every moment of everyday. And I got it. And now what? What do you do when you have what you want and you don’t know how to want the next thing quite correctly? What happens when you’ve calculated the way to achieve a goal, and nothing but the way to achieve that one goal, and you reach it or you make it, and you aren’t quite sure how to reach anything greater? When eighteen years have been spent on one thing and you get that thing, then how are you to know how you initiated that plan eighteen years ago? I don’t remember who inside of me gave me the tools to make it here. I don’t know who drove me to this place with pure self power. I don’t know that person anymore and now I’m alone with just the me I am now and she doesn’t know what to do about what she kind of might want. The problem is I got my first wish granted and I know what the other two wishes should be but I can’t phrase them correctly and I’m just so scared my genie isn’t going to understand so I just sit there staring at a magic lamp never getting any closer to understanding how to get what I want.

“My thoughts get all jumbled up. I start thinking or talking about something but I never get there. Instead, I wander off in the wrong direction and get caught up with all sorts of different things that may be connected with the thing I want to say but in a way I can’t explain…My trouble is that I’ve got too many thoughts.”

I’m in a perpetual state of wanting. Wanting to have longer hair. Wanting to have clearer skin. Wanting to be thinner. Wanting to be taller. Wanting better clothes. Wanting better shoes. Wanting nicer makeup. Wanting nicer things. Wanting more money. Wanting more attention. Seeking love. Wanting more friends. Wanting to go better places. Wanting more power. Wanting more success. Seeking love. Wanting to be beautiful. Wanting to be beautiful, like that girl. Wanting to be better, like them. Always wanting always wanting always wanting. Never content with just being myself anymore. Not anymore. 

I promised myself I wouldn’t change.

Oops. 

The fear of eating.