literature

shrinking

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Daily Deviation

Daily Deviation

March 13, 2014
A wrenching true story of the struggle with an eating disorder: shrinking by AlloenDreams.
Suggested by MadHat11D6
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Literature Text

please, don't tell me how beautiful it is that i've parted my thighs like the sea. 

because there is nothing pretty about the tears in last nights dinner, or the way my hands shake around silverware. i am not poetry, but a language lost --in the spaces where flesh used to occupy lies everything i needed to say, kept as the only thing i could ever bear to swallow. if you try to write sonnets about the scars on my knuckles or the arch of my ribs, i will tell you in nine syllables less that this is more than abstinence and foggy reflections. i will tell you how my little sister can carry me in her arms like a child, and how my father can hardly navigate my bedroom floor without touching the brown vomit stains that makes his brow heavy. i will tell you how it feels to hold your own heart in your hands, to feel it break and skip like an old, worn cd. i will tell you how i am nineteen and fishing through musty boxes of clothes from my childhood, only to find that not a single pair of shorts can fit my sadness right. 

because anyone who has bent themselves over the toilet bowl for a spine like rosary beads can tell you that counting each notch never managed to calm the rotten waters of their stomach. that at three in the morning, easing their heart back into their chest, they only pray that tomorrow, something stays down. and even if i am alive years from now, there will never be a single soul who will want to sing about how my kisses taste like vomit and diet cherry pepsi or how i never leave the bed sheets warm. because my bones ache for thunderstorms, and when it rains instead of staying inside and watching movies, i stand outside to see if becoming a live wire could make me feel more alive. because i am the worst dinner date, the mouth you never wanted the obligation to force-feed, and a skeleton lying still in your bed instead of your closet. because anyone who tries to hold me only ends up circumnavigating this body and embracing themselves, feeling nothing but a pulse beating blue against their chest.
 
because when i am smaller, i am so much more than just less. 
© 2013 - 2024 AlloenDreams
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aprilbrookie's avatar
This is absolutely beautifully written. I have read this 3 times and it gives me goosebumps. Please keep writing because you are amazing at poetry. I related so hard to this.