I make a fool of death with my beauty

Girls get really good at making a dead thing look beautiful and even better at making dying look beautiful. I cover my body in flowers and lie myself in the dirt, but dead will always be dead, and since I am not yet, the animals will always smell it.

You wouldn’t see it from looking at me, but death is already creeping through my bones. My brittle bones, which I imagine would crumble into pieces if you held them in your hands. It’s almost a shame that you can’t see it on me; all that hard work down the drain, amongst other things. There are days when I wish you could see it on me, days when I wish someone would look at me with eyes of concern instead of admiration, and then maybe they would ask if I was okay. Is that what I’m seeking above all? Just for someone to notice that I am not alright? Possibly. Regardless, on most days, you can not see it on me, and I pass under everyone’s gaze without any detection. It is quite a shame.

Through all this, I’ve come to realize that I have become quite the actress. Masking my early morning runs as a passion for the sport, passing up my lunch for a couple of slices of deli meat because I’m not hungry. Au contraire, if you could hear the voices in my head and the gnawing in my stomach, they sing a different tune. I have professed my love for foods that I couldn't care less about, shunning others that I crave late at night. I say I’m not hungry for lunch only because the clock hasn’t struck 12 pm yet, and if anyone looked close enough, it would seem that there was a lock on my snack cabinet that only releases at 3 PM. I do not know when my death sentence was first drafted, when I began to fear simple starches and the homemade meals I grew up loving. I do not know when I first began to criticize the reflection in the mirror, when all I could see were flaws staring back at me. 

My dinner from hours ago fills my mouth before I expel it into the open bowl, and sometimes I pretend it's my own blood filling myself, the ache in my stomach a bullet wound, the pellet tearing apart my intestines, nestling its way between my kidney and pancreas. That would be a more glorious way to die, I think. As I flush the toilet, I watch as the vomit circles the drain, taking with it my dignity. That’s the funny thing about self-hatred and hunger; they always come back, no matter how hard I fight them. And it seems for me that I can not seem to disentangle the two feelings, hating when I’m hungry, and I am always, always hungry. 

I think of myself as a fool, most of the time, for fearing sustenance and a simple act of surviving. There is a twisted, perverted satisfaction in seeing just how bad it can get. I wonder what it’s like to exist in a body that isn’t constantly plagued by thoughts of numbers and calculations, fixating on the way my waistband is sitting on my hip and the sleeve of my shirt feeling like handcuffs around my wrists. I wonder what memories and song lyrics were forgotten to fit memorized nutrition labels, and it has struck me that maybe I will never get better. And maybe that’s just what I want.

I remember seeing the number on the scale get smaller, but so did the number of times I saw my friends because I couldn’t bear to go to dinner with them. The number of miles I ran got larger while the number around my waist got smaller, and so did the number of times I laughed throughout the day, and I have made peace with the fact that maybe the number of years I have left to live may also be diminishing. And thus, the number of books I will read, the number of songs I will listen to, the number of people I will fall in love with, the number of times I will hug my parents, are all coming down, slowly, like a countdown to my untimely demise. But maybe through it all, I will find myself beautiful, and wouldn’t that have made it all worth it in the end? 

I love my mom and dad so much that I have begun to dig my own grave, just so they won’t have to. I have picked out my own flowers, and the casket is polished so much so that I can see my own reflection on the surface. I choose not to look. It is like playing in the snow when I was a child. At first, it’s all fun and games, sledding down the hill in the front yard, not yet noticing how much the cold seeps in between the layers of my clothes. And suddenly, my fingers are frozen and there is a chill that has reached to the soles of my feet, but still I do not want to go inside. It hurts at first, but then everything goes numb. How much longer can I stay in the cold? How much longer until I don’t feel the cold and instead my limbs are paralyzed? It’s a game with no competition, no rivalry. It’s all in my head.

I have made art out of my death, and despite the crying faces in the crowd, the grief does not yet reach me. Don’t I make dying look beautiful? Am I beautiful yet?