Pop tarts dont lie

One minute and six seconds, without breathing was the best I could do. If there is a prize for creative suicide, I have never heard of such an award, and if suicide is considered cowardice, throw me a word for someone like me, too afraid to commit the deed. Without the assistance of a plastic bag over my head, I am just a five year old having a temper tantrum instead of a 25 year old serious about ending it all. But I have been known to fool myself more than once.

Waking like none of it has happened, vaguely aware, half in half out, the owl's lament is a part of my reverie. Mommy is in the kitchen cooking breakfast, the sky is blue and the jeans in my drawer are a size 6, loose. There is no pain, no shame and the pressure points on my teenage buttocks do not ache, because my satin skin is tighter than my little brother’s football. Jason still loves me, and people are still accepting of me, even kind, so kind their gaze lingers comfortably but they don’t stare, nor do they taunt or turn away in disgust. And then it is over, as it always is, the space between slumber and wakefulness, for however fleeting. It will take some time to get out of bed, and more often than not, I ask myself, “Why bother,” convincing myself again, that there is a diet that will work. Today is the day, and before I can boil a hard egg, the owl has stopped calling and the hawk I can’t see overrides everything telling the cherry pop tarts I put on the top shelf not to mind if they do what is required of them, making their way into my stomach barely chewed. There was a time I would have thought of putting my fingers down my throat at such a moment, but I cannot conceive that paranoia and retching aren’t twins. Sculptors don’t get everything right on their first try either.

“It’s all your fault Jason,” I would say to him if I my legs wanted to walk up to the mailbox and post a letter, a forever stamp in the right hand corner, with no return address, but no one sends letters in the mail anymore. Or maybe they do, if there is no other way. What’s the difference. Even I don’t want to see my shadow.