Body

I know now, as perhaps I startlingly have always known,

that I shall never be happy with my body until I no longer have it.

It is morbid, the idea of the same soul looking down on a body so healthy, so good to its heart, with nothing but contempt. I know when I am old, and sat with joints and bone protruding the wrong way that I will be sorry for how I have treated it. Scarred it. Starved it.

Today I weighed myself, and I clutched at the sides of fat that weren't there when I was seventeen. But of course, I didn't have clarity or stability then. Would I exchange the body I had when I was so mentally ill I did little more then pass through my days, for the community and creation I now have?

No. And even with exercise and eating right, I will never be that weight again. Because I am not sick like that now. I refuse to be. And while half of my mind objects, that skinny seventeen year old that loiters somewhere within my chest rattles at the bars of my ribs like a cage, begging I do not become such a thing again.

I notice her. I cry. I cry some more for the state I am seven years later.

And I eat. I drink. I live.