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Each staccato tick

7/6/2017

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Picture
This spot
Is an angry red
A sting and a tang
When touched to my tongue
And I can't stop
Poking at it
Wanting to hasten healing
Impotent in the face of the second hand
Laughing at me
With each staccato tick


I'm not better
Something fresh always replaces it
Somewhere and something else
To worry
There is no salve for this
No unguent to soothe
Only acclimation to new pain
As it fades to background noise
Becoming a new instrument
In the symphony of scars


Can you hear it
Playing louder
As you approach?
I tried to warn you








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I was fat

6/28/2017

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Two years ago, I was very fat. Two years ago, I was in a marriage that didn't deserve me with a person who didn't deserve me. I was abused as a child - emotionally, verbally, and physically. It was the abuse that made me fat to start. I was long and lithe as a small child. At six, the abuse began, and so I ate. I ate for the dopamine comfort because it was the only kind available. At nine, they sent me to fat camp. At twelve, they sent me to Weight Watchers. At thirteen, I was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder that causes the equivalent of a spinal cord injury. I was briefly paralyzed from the waist down, and my mobility, balance, and sensation were never the same again. The entire time, they called me fat either explicitly or subtly, hiding it under mock concern for my health.


At nineteen, I lost a lot of weight. I lost it fast, often 4 pounds or more a week. I lost it by overexercising in secret and fearing most food. I let people think I was just a vegetarian, but I was actively shunning anything I thought might contain fat. In those months, I was the sickest I've almost ever been. I had severe abdominal pain, I was paranoid about everything that went into my mouth, and my immune system weakened to a point where I became so ill with strep they had to give me IV fluids, Vicodin, and baby penicillin. It leveled me for weeks.


And then I was basically married. I was 1200 miles away from all of my friends and family. I felt isolated and lonely. I stopped exercising, and I started eating. We were so poor that dinner was cobbled together from whatever was laying around and cheap. Minute rice, pasta, cheese. It wasn't just the poverty, though. My partner's friends and family hated me at first because I was the bitch who took him away. He wasn't kind, either. He made me feel stupid. He made me feel insufficient. He made me feel small. So I got big -again - without meaning to.


At some point in my mid-twenties, I cried myself to sleep over my size. I told him I was thinking about surgery, but it's one of my greatest fears, and we were so poor (not to mention often uninsured) that it would ever happen. He said he loved me as I was. I believed him and I did nothing. And I got bigger.


Between 19 and 34, I gained 135 pounds. In that time, I learned to love my body for what it did for me. I wasn't impeded by it, and it allowed me all I wanted to do. I'm sure I was excluded from job opportunities because of it. I know people talked about me because they'd say it to my face and I'd tell them a variant of "fuck you" depending on my association to them. I was still proud of my fat and I hailed the body positivity movement. I argued with people about how thinness is not part of the social contract, and I never signed one to start, so they can shove that contract. I still feel this way, and I still haven't signed. Your body is your province to do with as you please. It is yours to move or be still. Yours to show or hide. Yours to share with someone else or to hoard. Your body is exclusively your business.


Two years ago, I was very fat. Two years ago I decided to become less fat. I still knew surgery wasn't an option, and I'd added a new autoimmune disorder that has a severe impact on metabolism. I knew it might be hard. My opinion on weight loss surgery had changed. It went from a possible solution to something with terrifying complications. It's not just one surgery, but several. You lose weight so quickly that your skin doesn't shrink with you, and it needs to be removed. They remove flaps from your middle, create seams in your arms and legs, tailors of flesh. Weight loss surgery also causes digestive problems. Vomiting and sudden diarrhea, vitamin deficiencies, bowel obstruction, hernia, hypoglycemia, and ulcers are all common. A patient's gallbladder will also usually call it quits shortly thereafter, adding yet another surgery. My only option was to change. I settled on a goal of a size 18 knowing I could still be fat and shop in normal stores. I refused to use weight as a goal because those numbers drive me insane.


And oh, a change was born. I realized my marriage wasn't worth me and I'd gotten so low, I mightn't get up again. I created boundaries. I started eating less and better - not least because my newfound boundaries made me nauseated for their boldness and unknown consequences. I found movement I didn't hate. I started taking the dog for long walks on my own to get away from my husband. To mix it up, I ordered kettlebells, 10 and 15 pounds to start. The next day, walking the dog, I broke my ankle. I was angry.


I used anger as a tool. Three days after the fracture, I started swinging. It was cathartic to hold a cannonball in my hands. I began low impact aerobics in a chair - my Old Lady Chair Workouts - to build endurance and increase endorphins. Within three months, I met my goal. A size 18 was a glory, and I reveled in it as it slipped over me, comfortably fastening around me. The thing was, I didn't stop there, and I couldn't. I introduced High Intensity Interval Training, I introduced more weight, I experimented with running. My life was still changing too fast for me to process, and the routine of exercise had become a comfort. I continued to drop a size every month or two for a year, shedding too big clothes like snakeskin. There were times when a pair of jeans would fit only long enough for me to wear them three times before they'd slide off me.


Things have mostly leveled now. I'm less than half my goal size today, and it bothers me. I resent XS clothing that fits me more than I ever resented an XXL, but I like wearing things that meet my quirky aesthetic and that they fit. Comfort in my fat has been replaced by a gnawing anxiety with me every time I feel like I've eaten too much because I'm afraid I'll wake up the next morning fat again. Street harassment has changed from the occasional jeer to encounters that are explicitly threatening because they think I can be had. I have become visible in ways I never expected or wanted. People are nicer to me. Strangers compliment me in public.


My options for partners expanded as my body contracted. I am no longer a fetish or a niche desire. I am a thing of mass appeal, but that's a problem. I'm not a thing and it's harder for people to dig for the person I am, preferring to simply leave the box unopened so they can look at the shiny packaging. I hate these things and I often hate my body. I hate the things I'm trying to change that won't - the crepey skin gathered at my belly, the stubborn arm flab. I hate that (at last weigh in 9 months ago) even 125 pounds down, it doesn't feel like enough, and there will always be a whisper that says, "smaller."


I take comfort in certain dynamics that are new like having a partner who loves and appreciates me entirely, knowing they felt the same when I was fat as they do now because while the packaging may be nice, and was always nice, the gift inside was always what really mattered, so I let them truly know me in ways I never could with someone else, and I look forward to the future instead of trying to brace for it. I appreciate being more approachable even if I don't want to be approached. I like finding clothes cheap and cute that fit like they were made for only me, no longer limited to my fat uniform of tank top, cardigan, and jeans.


I've become harder in many ways, and less sympathetic. My body has harsh angles that dig into soft places and hurt. So does my personality. I'm more judgmental these days. I think bariatric surgery is an expensive cheat destined to fail because they didn't have to do the work or change the habits needed for long term success. I think people who stay fat but complain about it are lazy. It's not fair to anyone and I'm not superior no matter what my ego says. I still love seeing fat bodies proudly displayed in crop tops, sheer bodycons, thighs rubbing in short shorts, and tiny bikinis. I love their stretch marks and rolls because I still have them (and hate mine) and lack these women's flamboyance. I love bigger men, too, with their dissonant firmness and softness, the ease of their strength, the depth of their laughter resonating in their chests.


I was fat, and I'm not anymore. It's not remarkable despite what so many people say when they see old photos. I accomplished nothing that ultimately matters in the end. I'm just smaller and harder now. I didn't work that hard to get here and I'm ashamed of how little I struggled in comparison to how much petty praise I've received. It's taught me that people are worse than I thought. It's taught me that I will always struggle and the nature of the struggle simply shifts or becomes slipperier. It's taught me I'm still me and I'm still not good enough.


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A promise

6/27/2017

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Picture
A promise
Is an oath
Is a vow
Is a solemn swearing
That you will do what it takes
To the end of it all

A promise
Is something I take seriously
That I make rarely
That I fulfill always

A promise is a gift
Without wrapping or bows
It is an opening of yourself
To the cost and debt of failure
Exposing your potential for weakness
To someone who shouldn't have to bear it
And you will not make them

A promise is a weight
Taken from me
By you
And I can't let it go
It's been dropped on soft tissue too many times
I will show you the scars if you ask

A promise should be kept
Locked inside your lungs
Dammed from slipping over your tongue
Through your teeth
I don't need another Trojan horse


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Fear of being found

6/26/2017

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Picture
When each tear is a word I can't speak
If I let them drop on a blank sheet
Could they be read?
Or would they smudge together
Like ink on the heel of my left hand?
Still getting in my own way
No tool made for my use
That I can't break
Or make garbled
Instead, I let them run down my cheeks
Some finding their way
Salty to my lips
Silence tasting like sadness
The rest drip onto my pillow
Frustration wasted
I turn it over
So I don't feel the cold and damp
Left in its wake
When I change my sheets
Wash them clean
I erase entries in a journal
I could never write
For fear of being found
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My threadbare heart

6/19/2017

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Picture
In the dark
I confess to you
All the things I was afraid to say for so long
Knowing you knew
You wondered why I kept them
Balled as tightly as a poppy before the bloom
But I wasn't ready
Petals spilling wide and bright vermillion
My center a soft, velvet black


I miss my sluggish February blood
Coursing patience through me
Cold and meandering
Forcing stillness in my body
Now waiting is a death sentence
The question of when a gnawing ache
In my depths


Patience may be a virtue
But I'm not one for piety
My virtue a wasted word
Stale on the tongue before it leaves
Yet I still pray
Please let this time
And my tears
Be worth it
Don't let my threadbare heart
Wear fresh holes in itself
Or me be left to linger
Sun-bleaching and frayed on the line


For I know
We are
Falling asleep with a shared book
Curry and ice cream and
Words so kind
They spill over the edges of us
Staining everything a perfect blue
And I want it more than anything that came before


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A confession

6/7/2017

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Picture
I have a confession to make
But not because I've sinned
And not because I violated a vow
These are things I haven't done
What I did
When I did it
Are not important
Except that it led me away from you
For better
Not for worse
You placed upon my head
Your jeweled crown of failures
And named me
(Blamed me)
Your queen
Your shoulders too weak to wear it yourself
I accepted the tainted gift
When you said it was for love
I stooped to bear it
And stayed


He didn't see my diminished posture
The shine dulled from my eyes
He saw through it
Holding up a mirror
Fashioned from truth
Lacking the distortion of unfulfilled promises
The warps and bows
You perpetually placed in front of me
Forcing me to look at what wasn't me
Saying it was


You lost me then
But not to him
Not really
You lost me to opened eyes
To truth
To my own broad, strong shoulders
To a head raised
A level gaze
And I won't look down again
Because you're smaller than me
While he is my equal
It's my turn to hold a mirror
Clean, smooth, and sharp edged
I wonder what you see
Underneath your crown


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Boulders of suspicion

5/24/2017

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Picture
Spoonfed weakness grain by grain
Accumulating in my belly
As stones in a bird's craw
Weighing me down
And I can't fly
Or flee


Fingers stuck down my throat
Trying to vomit them up
Knowing they won't come
And the idea
Of slitting myself open
To reach in and pull them out
Is too much to bear


I know it's been done to us all
Told it was others just like us who did it
I maintain that they didn't know
They were seeding boulders of suspicion
Instead of pearls of grace
From the same spoons
For which they'd opened their own mouths wide
As baby girls
As young women
As mothers


Suffused with the poison
Of contempt and competition
Content to waste
To wish
We looked like we did a year ago
Before we had children
Before we had lives of our own
Before puberty gave us bodies
With lines that aren't straight
Always beautiful in a time that isn't now
Because to admit your beauty is here
In this moment
Is a strength
And to be strong will render us
Unwantable
Unneedable
Undesirable
Unlovable
Unworthy
Alone in a world that's already cruel enough
For girls


But that boy over there
He says he's strong
Smart
Handsome
Rewarded with attaboy and pats on the back
By everyone he meets


Why are we different?
Why is he applauded and I am scorned?
Our squirming origin the same


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Without looking back

5/22/2017

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Picture
I'm leaving by accident
Just as I arrived
Borne aloft by the hope of love
Blown west like a dandelion's clock
Waiting for your voice
Saying "go!" on the wind


But this time
It's not the going that's happenstance
It's the reason
The knowledge of home
In a place I've never seen
A permanence determined
And I'm not afraid of forever
Like I always have been


To quell my impatient fidget
I prepare
Writing lists
Making plans
Learning new languages
Revisiting old ones
And I know we won't use them
Much or at all
But it stills the clamor
Quiets my "when?"
Redirecting the instinct to bolt
Without looking back












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A goal without definition

5/16/2017

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Picture
And there is a weight in my chest
Too heavy to lift
Compressing my lungs
So I'm sipping careful breaths
Of air so thin it stings


This is what it is to miss you
Living half a life
Just enough to sustain me
Not enough to fulfill


I want the small things
Keys dropped next to each other on the table
A shared ice cream spoon in the sink
Streaky with residue no amount of licking can remove
My ribs expanding to their fullest
And you next to me


This feeling is new
A tie that binds without binding
The weight of waiting
A goal without definition


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What won't mend

5/12/2017

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Picture
It's the twinge of healed bone in a cold snap
A distant echo of pain you've long since forgotten
And you're suddenly, inexplicably angry
At your traitorous self
For the reminder
That you haven't (maybe can't ever)
Set it entirely right
So you apologize to everyone
Except yourself
For your failings
Which nobody else sees
Until you shine light on them
As penance for your lack of resilience
This is what I've broken
This is what won't mend
This is what pulses and bleeds
What makes me stumble
And why I won't take a hand
Offered to help me up
Because I deserve this
Look at all I've done and shouldn't
All I haven't but could have
Maybe someday
I will no longer flinch
Untold winters since
Under my belt
But not today
So please don't leave
Have the patience I don't
To love me just as I am


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