eighteen

Eighteen birthdays are eighteen cakes are eighteen times you've scrubbed myself off the bathroom floor. Or maybe just six. No one is born this way, after all. The monster -- not-monster, pretty little thing she is -- sets into your bones at the budding age of eight. Settles into the marrow, gnaws at the edges until you can't take the pain. You had read about of her, of course. Leafed through page after page of almost-comely names like bulimia, anorexia, binge; ignored the rest of the teacher's lesson about her, instead staring at the lovely bones of this small, small girl.

Food journals aren't literature, but neither are diary entries. Everyone reads those. You liken yours to the ones lining libraries at times -- except with daydreams about empty and hollow instead of history, numbers counting calories instead of dates. Paragraph after paragraph of all ways you could shrink and lie and hide. And then, slowly, paragraph after paragraph of all the things you could be, all the things could happen. Daydreaming about other people in other worlds this time -- instead of going on about the colorless one that was your own.

And that was salvation, you suppose.