She got into a fight this morning
She does most mornings. Her belly says it’s hungry and she tries to devise a new way to stifle the noise with the smallest amount of food. Today will be the day. Today will be a day of no food and there can be less of her.
She fails, of course. The body’s survival instinct kicks in and she cannot resist a guilty slither of this or a stolen teaspoon of that. A survival instinct which never seems to make it to her thoughts and the cruelty they carry. Each mouthful tastes of failure and disappointment that yet again, she deserves to look as disgusting as she knows she is.
It’s safer being ugly. She notices when she feels confident, men harass her in the street more. The lewd comments, the obscene gestures, the occasional grabbing. It doesn’t happen when she dresses down. When she shows the world she has a dirty secret to hide. When she’s too scared to hold herself with the daring stance of “I exist”.
She picks the crusts off her self esteem and piles love onto others plates. Her sense of self gets further from happy with each teaspoonful she denies herself and distracts others by shoving the menu under their nose.
This time. Maybe today. Maybe today will be the day she manages to win over genetics and hunger and stop occupying space. She tries to hold herself smaller so she takes up less world. She apologies with her posture for the oxygen she consumes.
In a world where food is a weapon. This woman is at war. She knows she’s never going to be as good as she is sold she has to be.
So everyday she places artillery in her mouth and digests its' guilt and plants minefields in her cells.
She got to go dancing with a man she cared for. He was a kind man and they were just starting to onion unpeel each other. In the process of trying to squeeze herself into a costume that did not make her look repulsive, she picked up her phone three whole times to tell him she was sorry, she wouldn’t be able to come sadly, as she was too ugly. Each time gently replacing the handset next to to another discarded dress that she had tried to wrap her rolls of skin in to pretend there may be something of beauty which could be revealed.
There is no beauty here. Only sadness and seeking of assurance from others for things that no one else can give.
Sometimes she thinks of the little girl who had her sense of pretty pounded out of her and is ashamed she’ll never be able to give her the cuddle that’d promise it won’t feel like this forever.
There is no recipe for forgiving herself for murdering her potential with each unkind thought. She’s never met an enemy as relentless as this one. She gardens her own revulsion to prove herself right.
It’s poisonous the way we treat our women. It’s poisonous the way we judge our women. It’s poisonous the way we treat ourselves. It is poisonous the way I treat myself.
These thoughts are heavy. They go straight to my hips.
I wish there was kindness for dessert. Not grated words I serve in a pile.
I wish this was not mine, and thousands of others, story.