All Beauty Must Die

I often contemplate the fact that my eating disorder has softened my fear of mortality: it forces me to confront death constantly, to stare down my Maker and give Her the finger. It has starved me of conviction to live and presents me with an ultimatum that terrifies me stupid: get better and gain weight or continue on this treacherous track to the inevitable grave.

I’ve been in relapse for exactly a year now; it’s the longest time I’ve been in relapse and the hardest 12 months I’ve endured out of the seven years I’ve had this disease (on and off). I don’t actively want to die, but I know that the long term physical effects of starvation and bulimia can be deadly – my pancreas, thyroid and stomach are all fucked already and my teeth, throat and bowels are currently suffering. My heart, more than the other organs, was not built to withstand such punishment and could give out if I decide to push it further. But, I don’t want to stop. The thought of gaining weight paralyses me with terror. I already feel repugnant, disgusting, ugly and overweight. I feel weak for not starving myself more. For not pushing my body to its limits.

I have a soul who loves me more than I could have ever imagined and I fear the effects of my anxiety and ED may have on him. I have my sisters and my nephew and my precious one-year-old niece and another niece or nephew on the way in December. I want to be around for them, I want to cover my skin in pretty artwork and admire the stories that have got me to the places where I want to be.
But I also have days – more often than not – where I want to rip off my skin and muscles and strip down to my bones and rearrange my DNA to be someone more beautiful and accepting of this mortal form.

Badly Built

He called me “fat” – the word breaking the silence
as though the air was offended by it.
Stinging my face with malicious intent
disguised with forced laughter as though a joke
when I have spent
three letters and twenty-four years’
worth of torment salting each wound upon soft thighs
to remind myself that I am
merely an adjective loaded with disgust.

Harmful words have been hurled at
this body that was my birthright —
I am only odds and ends of other people:
legs too curvy for a pear-shaped body
bruised on the inside and out and a mouth
too wide, so my poetry is constantly jumbled when I
have never able to fit into the “pretty girl” jigsaw puzzle.
As a teenager I spent my time
twisting my tongue behind a crooked
smile that never reached hazel eyes
on a body always too big to be desired
I eventually shrank to the
size of my self-esteem at the age of
eighteen, and since then I’ve been
battling my reflection every single
morning when I put on my war paint
But I have decided to resign myself to this fate;

I will learn to love this shrine –
designed as a size-whatever to be picked apart
by a society that has
starved the very meaning of beautiful.
Like the flowers, this temple will flourish and grow –
it was not built just to be burned down when it
houses a soul capable of so much more
than the hell it has known