To know I am not loving well, is a dragging pain upon itself.

Of course, I have lived with that pain my entire sentient life.

But it has always been a pulsing, aching bruise.

To drag is to take my very heart, my very living power, and to pull it anyway but right.

It is a pain from being held too tightly, cherished too dearly, loved too clearly.

Like caging a wild beast is what I imagine it is to want me. Thrashing and gnashing at my captor who only wishes to touch the skin on my neck.

But I am made for agonizing truancies, not for truthfully's.

I wish to live, not to survive, and to love and to live are not mutually exclusive anymore.

One cannot live without the other dying.

And no matter the ferocity and honesty of my love, it will forever weaken and pale to the very real darkness in my own mind.

The darkness is true. Substantial. Ever-present.

Love has only ever been fleeting, with the same devastation of something natural.

Perhaps it is natural. The ache doesn't feel like it.

Pulsing.

It would be easier to have never met you.

To have never been loved. Wanted. Cared for unabashedly.

Because I hadn't ever had it, so I hadn't ever needed it.

Now I cannot let myself want it.

Perhaps before, when I had my first love in the way that I am yours.

Back when my pale skin wasn't sickly, and my hair was curly and not chemically leached of life.

Back when my heart wasn't hardened and I wasn't all cracked skin and bruises that won't fade.

If you could see the tricks the little magician in my mind pulled,

cruel and unfair to you, you would never look at me the same.

And that thought is the only thing painful enough to draw tears from my apathetic body.

And all I can do is feel the ache, knowing I will ruin this soon.

Will ruin this for you. Because I cannot live healthily, and I cannot accept a love that asks for nothing in return.

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.

She will not leave me.

The sickness in me wars; be manipulative, be mean, mock.

I cannot do this to her.

I have tried the second and third, and she has remained steadfast in her devotion, and that burning inferno that has been omnipresent since birth cools to exhaustion within me.

It tries again, but it gets weaker with every pass.

Because she remains painfully solid. Painfully there. Painfully patient.

I sit my teeth, and flex my jaw to the point to pain, and I loathe. Quietly. Silently.

I loathe her dedication to me, because not even my own mind can remain so sure to its vessel.

I will not manipulate her as dictated by the sickness, because she has only ever been kind, gentle and pure in her intent.

The sickness does not battle me on this.

I think even it knows it cannot compare to her honesty.

Grief without death, is a strange thing to feel.

I leave my grandmothers house— I watch intently as she cooks, commit it to memory.

I mention the knife she has never not used since she came to this country in '59, and idly mention how it should be framed. She grins. My heart swells, because she is so insecure about her teeth and the one missing. But I see her so wholly, so beautifully, as much a Queen as the woman who reigned my paternal country for so long.

I hold up her cane after I help her to sit with a ghostly hand because she loathes to feel incapable, and I made a joke about it as I wield it like an angry suburban home-owner with children fretting about on their lawn. She laughs. I feel a silent victory.

And I sit. I look up to the broken clock, and I inhale deeply the scent of her home.

I could never describe it. I have upturned the air fresheners in her home that have never once been replaced— but it's not that. It isn't the detergent my aunt buys for her. It is a smell like old wood, like memory, like petrichor before the rain.

Like when everything was once whole. And I know she anguishes that it no longer is.

She reminds me every time I speak to her.

She gets that distant look in her eye, and my own falls to the ring on her hand that suffocates her skin. And I wish she had had longer with her husband, my grandfather, my mother and aunt's loving dad.

I wish my brothers and cousins and I could have met him.

I don't ever deter her from her dialogue. Monologue.

She speaks of us as young, and I used to loathe it. Because I wasn't little anymore, and I wanted her to know that.

But now, as I stare down at all the scars from time on her dining table, I know she knows. She just wishes she had longer. A longer that didn't hurt. That didn't take more and more of her; a formidable woman that bled and breathed strength and passion in all she did.

And I listen, to whichever grandchild she worships that day, and I try to find any part of me that resembles her.

My heart, maybe. I hope so.

She tells me when she dies I am the one she doesnt want to clear out her things.

I tell her she won't die. I act blasé about it, because we all do, because the reality floods heat from the chest to every extremity, like the body is begging to die.

I nod. I steeple. And I grieve a future I know will eventually come, when the judge above decides.

There is nothing akin to family.

Nothing like the bruise on my arm, as my brothers goodbye hug leading fist first.

He once made faces at me, poking my soft spot as the eldest chastised him because in his seven year old eyes, my head would fall off.

Nothing like the freeing of a grandmother in her mid nineties wobbling for something to give me when I say I'm satiated from a meal— my cooking prowess inherited from her, but leaving with a pocket full of Werthers Originals.

She taught me how to walk so sure in her own gait, beaming as I meandered in my red shoes with her calloused and strong grip on my little hands.

Nothing like the smell of soup as I fall asleep early, to which my mother lovingly tends as she did when I was much smaller, and much less caring of the simplicities of scent and tradition.

I never even noticed when she began to go grey. I know I will notice when she can no longer sit up without assistance.

Nothing like never seeing my father, yet seeing him every day in the mirror. In my hair, in my nose, in my dimple.

I see him growing into his father's laugh-lined face each day, but his soul the same as my grandmothers as he asks me to help pick strawberries from his garden.

No, there is nothing quite like it. The absolute love, and absolute devastation, of family.

I look at myself in the mirror. Pour over every inch of my eyes, clutch the tabletop as I lean forward to search for any blue. Because if I saw it, it would be a punch to my already restless soul. But I search.

My own fingertips don't want to trace the reflection. I know my features don't match my mothers. I see it when I dip into her bathroom as she gets ready for bed and see us standing side by side, and I see a warped mix of you and something somehow worse.

I see it in family photos. My nose may dip like those I love, but that is the extent of similarity.

I am pale, and my eyes aren't dark enough, and my feelings aren't quartered enough to be my mother's.

I feel hesitant in my own reflection, sheepish,— like an adopted child its unknown sibling.

But I am glad I'm not.

I share my brothers half dimple, and their heart.

It is my mom's.

Always trying, always wanting more, never finding it but seeking regardless and terribly broken when it is never achieved. At least a few weeks is devoted to each of us. Never at the same time, but a constant.

My mother gave up years of her own pain so we could feel ours, while you felt nothing hut selfishness in the bed of someone that didn't resemble my mother. Treated a girl my age as a daughter. Goaded my brother to be interested in her.

Pain is the only constant since you.

They told me my golden curls were yours— so I dyed and straightened them to submission— through burns to my scalp and neck and a constant chemical itch to the tender skin of my skull you never kissed. My mother did. My brothers did. Your own brother did.

You don't question it when you see it; the change. Maybe you like me better this way. You always mention when you see me that I look slimmer; fitter. Ask me of my diet. Ask me of my diligence to working out, and frown when I say less then four times a week.

When I straighten my unruly curls, you chastise me. Tell me I'm beautiful natural.

I say nothing. Because you were not there when I first straightened my hair with my mom, cousin and aunt in my childhood kitchen. Felt relieved to be rid of the curls, though the blonde stubbornly didn't burn off.

I take your slamming of cupboards when youre angered. I grimace when you offer my brother a fifth beer but won't offer me a second, because I shall permanently be the little girl you left.

You were not there.

I tilt my head later at night during movies when he asks about my maternal grandmother, outliving his own mother. Glance at my closest brother if I'm so lucky he's there; the only one willing to hear my stories, to ache alongside me, to come to his baby sister with questions of our father I have poured over and studied for half a decade now.

And I sip my second beer, curls free, calories two thousand in the negative. And I grimace when he says I'm underdressed in sweats at eleven at night, when they are dressed similarly.

And I understand his anger. His dependence on alcohol, because it cools me in his presence.

Writing a book feels like just channeling my thoughts.

No one reads it, I know that. I see it from the engagement when I post them.

I feel so hollow when I look. Forty-one reads, half my own making sure it's all right,

Written well. Correct grammar. No discrepancies. Written so people will like it.

But no one sees. So they remain words plastered to the walls that are increasingly boxing me in. But they are my words, but they stick. There is no peace in writing it.

But I keep writing, because if I don't, I may fall apart at the very thread-barren seems that hold me together. Nothing I've quilted together, but simply there from birth.

I have worn them so thin, until they have become far beyond frayed.

I cannot slip from frayed seems, but over time they either wear me down or I them.

I am not sure which is losing the fight.

All I know, is I do not feel well,

The slight difference in the eyes of memory— the energy, even,

and that of true memory.

I lay back against a slightly dimpled pillow, supported by a throw. I imagine a memory dear to me.

My eyes quirk. So do my lips.

I jostle as I lean forward, my spine arched unattractively as I put on a song— one of many of my youth. I lay back in the same position.

I cant document my smile. The overwhelming pulse of glee any my heart.

The love I feel. I am not sure to what— but it is blinding. It is platonic, familial.

I bite my laugh, laughing until my eyes are so involved it blurs my vision.

It's my first love. My best friend. Someone I talk to briefly, rarely, but someone of nearly eight years I have yet to meet but has known nearly every thing about me since we were both awkward, unassured fourteen year olds.

And I love, and I yearn for the ease of youth, and I seer he daughter, and she is just as much family to me as my own blood born relatives.

I swipe the rough fabric of my sleep shirt against my mouth. It hurts my skin beautifully and I bite at the fat of my cheek that fills like a block into my open mouth.

Think idly of the person this shirt belonged to. Who told me I was not the woman whom they fell in love with, but held a bitter hope I'd get back to it. I was not the kind, gentle, nubile and putty shape once adored. Easily manipulated in warm hands. Ever pressing tighter.

I remember being told, sectioned away from a family I had just met who knew too much about my own I begged to not be disclosed, that my teeth were too sharp. Too uneven. I looked to the shops marketing to tourists, and when that person prattled on about teeth filing, I was sure I must be a visitor too. Unsure on the land I was very born upon if I belonged, when the litany of bodies around me were just passing through.

I am not the woman you knew, but you didn't wait with bated breath. Took me breaking as the way out.

I have never visited that road with those shops again. And I lick at my uneven front-teeth each day just in case they shift, so I can justify fixing them, so I don't have to reward your want for my suffering.