I am so terrified of this. The day has gotten closer and closer over the months. Now that it is so near, tomorrow, less than 24 hours away, it stares me in the face: a writhing shapeless monster, my stupid fear. I cannot begin to express it. It hunts me down when I try to ignore it and pins me to the floor and crunches me to bits like a wolf with a bone. Leaves me shaking and shuddering and choking on my own revulsion at myself, this pathetic human being who is so frightened of going to overnight camp. I try ... I tell myself that I am being unreasonable, I know that I am. I try to rise above it but I fall every time, tailspin into dementia, faceplant hard into this otherworld full of sickening beauty and horror. Where I cannot tell the differences.
And there is no way to get around this, because I know. I know that the other girls will be so different it will be like a slap in the face every time I am around them. They will get along so well, they will laugh and talk and function. And I won't be able to bear it because I will be the one who wakes up in the middle of the night and stands uncertainly on the balcony, swaying, wanting to fling myself down the steps so my bones will split away from one another on the dust below. I will be the one slipping sandwiches into my pockets while they see who can eat the most pasta and they will not be counting calories and grams of fat, they will NOT be recording into little notebooks what they ate and did not eat but I will. And I will be separate, I will be different, and when I walk into the cabin they will stop their talking. There is no escape. I know what will happen. Every day I will wake up and the awful reality will crash over my head and drag me under, a riptide wrenching me through another day in that hell. Every day I will want me scream and claw myself to bits because I am stuck here and there is NOTHING, absolutely nothing I can do about it. I will spend too much time in the water in hopes of numbing myself from what I feel. And what I feel is so many unreasonable emotions, blown far out of proportion in my head where they tower over me and fence me in. There is this one ... I can't describe it very well ... this terror that seems to come from my spine, this horrible fear that I am wasting everything, that I am trapped, that I am getting old. No matter how hard I try I cannot contain it; it is a wild thrashing beast that will crunch my fingers to dust if I try to cage it. Some of these things, these monsters they have voices.
Ah, I have said too much. No one reads this but I am not supposed to let it known how I am feeling. I am meant to smile and perform my lines flawlessly: "oh, that's perfect, thank you so much!" But so often I fail at even that. I am not the daughter I should be. I was not able to be the friend I should be, so I had to make it so that I had no friends. It gives and it takes away. Only so much now has been taken that all I am left with is this uncontrollable loathing of myself, my appearance, the way I am. Oh, how it hurts! This madness. How crazy have I become?
Me!
This hateful collection of flesh.
Stop poisoning your body with food!
Don't touch, don't taste ...
Sometimes I feel like a wild animal,
Hunting, running, starving for days
But then I have to be human again and eat,
But then I can't stop, Ican'tstopIcan'tstopIcan't.
Ouch, but I have grown to love those stinging lines in the flesh
FAT, they proclaim, give a name to my state of being.
All these vast and sickening emotions all fighting over control of my head:
What shall we make her today? Sad, shall we drown her in her own tears again?
How about we make her suicidal! Or how about furious, that one's
always fun. Don't you love it when she ruins herself, carves things in her skin?
So lovely. Let's make her argue with herself. Oh, let's.
When I'm trying to sleep and my thighs touch by accident and I scream into my pillow until my voice is scraped raw and useless.
When I run until the sidewalk swims before my eyes, shimmered in heat and exhaustion, and that still isn't enough.
(What, exactly, is enough?)
When I pinch my skin and the fury at myself rises up, fills me to the brim and I hit myself, create flocks of blue-black butterflies on my skin.
When the nutrition labels are my definitions. It is no longer 150 calories, it is 150 fights with my parents that made me say horrible things and cry all night after. It is not 5 grams of fat: it is 5 grams of horrible, useless, disgusting, shameful. The carbs add up like all the times I just wanted him to look at me, notice me, feel something, anything.
Anything.
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