[TW: Bulimia]

Flesh heaves and spills as I breathe on the floor. No arms come to grab me by the shoulders and startle me to senses in the moment that I put two fingers down my throat and push the food out of myself.

The purge might save me.
Bile burns my throat.
Face red, my ear hurts. But I go to sleep.
You can eat hunger, you see, it's okay. Run from guilt, the guilt eats you.

Words come dressed in concern but smell like phobia.
Worse when they bring love with them.
“If you were a little thin you’d have been my girlfriend”, said my teenage crush.
I sucked my stomach in and breathed only half all day. Then at home, hid in the back room and stuffed my panicking mouth with food.

Because “don’t complain,” they’d say, “change yourself.” Suck it up, till you too loathe the monster that you are.
Till your deeds and demeanour fit in the same seat.

I have no tongue to say the things that I want to. All the language I know about my body is a language of disgust. Language that addresses the fat body as a house of despair and disease. A language in which the fat body is only an obstacle, only death and doom.

Being and body are not different.
If health is the goal, hate, of all things, won’t take me there.

Do you know any words that I can love myself in?
Words that don’t look like mirrors in white light.