Sometimes I feel so big, in a metaphorical sense. As if everything within my life is so magnified, the walls closing in on me. The pressure is almost too much. The feeling is so overwhelming, anxiety starts to swallow me whole. When I feel as though I’m this big, as if everything I do is under scrutiny, I take a step back and think about how I am merely a minuscule piece of the population. I am simply coexisting among millions of other people with lives as big as mine. There are millions of people feeling all different types of emotions, yet all just as intense as mine. Somehow, that feeling is so comforting. That even though there may be things happening in my life that feel detrimental, and are tearing me apart, there are others feeling the same as I do. More importantly, there are people who have felt this before and now live lives that are completely evolved. They too felt like they had reached the end, that they had reached the brink, and now have moved on. They’ve freed themselves from that feeling of impending doom. It forces me to realize there is so much I’ve put behind me and even more that is ahead of me. I can feel myself shrink and the pressure become alleviated. I’m like another car on a busy highway. Driving on my own among others, with people behind me and people in front of me. People by my side and people passing me. Simply coexisting.

The deep dark trenches of my past welcome me with open arms

I know this familiar comfort is anything but a safe haven,

Yet I want to feel the hollow emptiness;

All I seem to crave, is to run and let the familiarity comfort me;

Secure me in its ominous embrace

The bony grip clenching onto my wrists; piercing my skin and leaving behind bruises Bruises as deep of a violet as my fingertips during my temporary winter

Such a cold and bitter winter, but once the throbbing agony subsides, what's left is numbness;

Like children making snowballs; compressing the glistening white powder together the way I compress my feelings and deepest thoughts into the pit of my empty stomach;

Grabbing fistfuls of snow that burn and tingle momentarily, until a warmth prevails and the sensation of biting rawness is ineffectual

These feelings and thoughts lying at the bottom of my hollow core cause a constant excruciating pain,

The desolation desperately trying to escape; attempting to climb through my protruding ribs like a ladder rung by rung

Memories flash before my eyes like blinding lightning, images of a figure nearly as emaciated as this skeleton in my closet, sending chills up my spine

Food is no longer food as it is now numbers;

I gaze upon a plate, and see all that my intellect is capable of contriving:

An indisputably exact calculation and a quantity; either allotted or forbidden

All quantities much too large; numbers much too high

Calories in the triple digits stirred up intense self loathing the way I used to compulsively stir my green tea I hated the taste of just to speed up my metabolism and the way my stomach would stir trying to work after all of the damage,

My malnourished self would pray for forgiveness for letting myself eat knowing full-well I would never forgive myself,

I would clasp my hands so tightly together while kneeling on my bony knees, just praying to God to help me not be so worthless

There is nothing like the satisfaction of seeing a digit on the scale decrease,

Like the feeling of drinking cold water on an empty stomach,

Like the feeling of reaching down my throat expunging all of my mistakes and emotions as if emptying myself of negativity,

Like lightly skimming over your own corners and edges; and being able to feel the hard solid prominence of your own skeletal structure,

Like the weightless sensation, feeling as if you're a piece of paper drifting through the wind freely,

When this is the only way to fulfill your biggest craving

The only way to be anything but empty without guilt;

How do you resist satisfying this particular hunger?

How do you resist striving to win?

Racing to the finish line as if there is a trophy for the the most famished waiting there,

As metallic as the pennies I flipped into wishing wells, wishing with all my might to take up less space than anyone around me

To simply be small, not just small, but the smallest

When you are losing, you are winning

And when you are winning in that sense you're on your way to being one of the ultimate losers

I'm fully aware of this fact yet in the deepest parts of my mind,

crammed with thoughts I do not disclose; being the ultimate loser is also the biggest achievement for there is no farther to go

Rather than weighing 6 pounds less,

You are simply 6 feet under;

You've reached the end, meaning the game is over and you have won because after all,

Losing is winning, and this is a battle I would love to win, and I desperately miss being so close to that finish line

There is a short story I've read, one that has become engrained in my mind

The little boy in the story struggles to control his temper so his father gives him a bag of nails and a hammer

He tells the boy to hammer a nail into the fence each time the boy failed to contain his anger.

As the story continues, the boy hammers in less nails each day, until one day the boy doesn't need to hammer in any

When he proudly informs his father of this, his father says to pull a nail out each day he goes without losing his temper

When all of the nails are removed, his father tells him to look at the holes left in the fence He explains to the boy how the fence will never be the same

He says that it's the same when you say things out of anger, they leave a scar, just like the nails left a scar in the fence

So I sit here now, pondering this story, and the concept of it

I'm asking myself whether you would learn anything from this story

I'm asking myself, if you were to grasp the concept, would you think to look at the scars you left on my heart?

Would you even notice?

Eternally blemished, scars upon scars litter my tarnished heart, burning and tearing it apart

It seems as though this is a lesson you were never taught

But even if you were, would it have made a difference?

You wave your hand in front of my face trying to snap me out of my daze

You say that I seemed hypnotized

When I laugh and nonchalantly say I had spaced out; you don't understand what I truly mean

How would you?

When I used the term spaced out, I meant it in a completely literal way; it was as if my soul and inner self were off in space somewhere

Another little spec of light floating around within the endless universe,

And the shell of me was the one sitting there in a trance

In actuality the real me was off in a whole other world; like I've been separated from my own body

What you don't understand is that you didn't snap me out of my daze

This trance is never ending

I'm a ghost watching my life unfold from the sidelines

I don't even know what team I'm cheering for

I'm constantly looking down at my hands

Moving them, observing them, wiggling my fingers as if they are foreign objects

That's exactly what they feel like

As I sit there, my entire being torn in two,

Part of me on the sidelines watching

The other part empty and going through the motions

I'm left wondering,

What is reality? Is this a dream?

The captivating instantaneous thrills of funhouses come to an end fairly quickly

After twists and turns

Dead ends, rolling floors

The short lived journey is always finished off by the funhouse mirrors

The younger me, clad in little braided pigtails, was smiling ear to ear looking into the mirror

Through little toothless gaps of baby teeth Came bubbly giggles

Giggles that filled the funhouse

A bright melody carried into the radiant heat of summer

The younger me skipped away from those funhouse mirrors to the cotton candy stand without a care in the world

She savored the sugary pink clouds with her sticky little fingers; not an ounce of guilt

After a while though, the funhouse mirrors didn't stay in the funhouse

They followed me

Every mirror I look into is a funhouse mirror

I stand here now looking into the warped reflection

This distorted image staring back at me

Giggles do not fill this room and I won't skip happily away

I'm staring at this false perception, picturing the cotton candy; those pink clouds of sugar

Imagining I can feel the warmth dissolve on my tongue

Taste the sweetness without the guilt

I stare at the mirror and feel nostalgia wash over me

It's a sad reminder of golden days that have turned to gray, and of bubbly giggles turned to sobs

The kind of sobs where your throat is strained and you've run out of tears to cry

The kind where you're left gasping for air, struggling to fill your lungs

I feel that little vein right above my right eyebrow throb from the pressure of clenching my eyes shut so tight

Desperately trying to protect myself from that warped image in front of me

If only funhouse mirrors would stay in funhouses

I am a clock; constantly ticking

I dwell in "what ifs"

I am fascinated by the splendor of hypothetical situations

Velocious heartbeats

Fists clenched so tight that knuckles turn white

I'm like a held breath that never gets released

I'm the butterflies fluttering in stomachs

The electric feeling surging through bodies

All the way to the tips of fingers from the tickling core of chests

I am a clock; my ticking is constant

You will grow accustomed to my shape shifting

I am here to stay

You played with my emotions like a little rag doll

You grabbed right onto the red braids not even caring enough to see that its little pink cheeks were wet with tears

You made me feel as though I was not good enough

As though I did nothing for you

You made me feel like I was so lucky to have someone like you who loves me

You continuously told me that I was lucky you even want me

You told me that no other guy would ever want someone like me

I believed you; I let every single word you said run through my mind.

I gripped onto each word like a leech

You drained me of my worth and beat me down to nothing with your fists of words

If only emotional abuse scarred my skin the way physical abuse did

Maybe then you'd see that your words and your demeanor are the reason why I was so broken

Maybe if your patronizing statements bludgeoned my skin

The way a punch would leave spots of purple and blue on my tender flesh, you'd notice how much you hurt me

You watched me burn like a cigarette to ash You picked up my heart made of glass and threw it against the concrete

You told me that it was my fault you threw it

Redundant apologies; you told me you were sorry

You glued all of the little glass pieces together and promised things would be different

With hesitation I handed you my mangled heart

The way your eyes flickered with malevolence when you looked at me while gripping my fragile heart was a punch to the gut; the impact so forceful I felt the wind knocked out of me

In that moment the feeling of regret was suffocating

You threw it down so hard the sound of breaking glass was ear piercing

You stomped on it until all that was left were shattered pieces

This time I picked up those pieces and put them together on my own

I've built walls of steal around my healing heart that are impenetrable

You took a piece of me with you when you broke me but now I am making myself whole without you

I am immune to the touch of your manipulation and I've learned how to block those punches

I am now the ruler of my own land;

Valleys of skin, mountains of bone, rivers of blood, and waterfalls of tears

Clouds of thoughts, and blooming flowers of emotions

This is my land and never again will I accept for someone to take that away from me