Trepidation 

CW: This content contains potentially distressing details, including grief, body dysmorphia, and depression.





I.

A deep rotation down the spiral.

Change hurts.
Good change, bad change-
I can't feel the difference.

Lately, I have this encompassing urge
to fight what is good for me.
To claw backward
toward whatever I already know,
even if what I know has made me small. 

A salted slug.


I know what’s good for me.

I can feel it there, hungry.

I swear
it’s pulling me down.




II.


Some nights draw on like sandpaper.

Each hour scraping my mind, 

Layer by layer;

Thinning

Until my eyes are raw,

Harrowed by my own circling of the drain,

With no fucking balls to actually go down the rabbit hole.







III.


Today I saw a rainbow 

At 7 am in LES

Over a Citi Bike dock;

Over a playground;

Over a person who was sleeping under the dock,

Who looked like they ate the rainbow

So that they could feel something lighter than themselves.






                                                   IV.


                                                       Listen to Cipher’s “Reaching Higher States” and swing a Bulgarian bag. 


                                                       You’ll get it.




V.


Do you remember that scene in 10 Things I Hate About You

Where Julia Stiles’ character is reading that shitty titular poem to/about Heath Ledger’s character, and she starts crying and runs out?

I always try to imagine what Daryll Mitchell’s character was thinking while watching an overprivileged, rich white girl with her mediocrity crying again. It's probably funnier than anything else that happened in that movie.



Also, how many episodes in a row of Charmed until you think my brain goes smooth enough to leak out of my ears?






















VI.


I don’t know when I learned that flesh remembers.

Not in sentimental scars,

Or releasable knots.

My flesh keeps an archive beneath the navel, 
Constricting my hips to my neck,

Where every entry
is still alive and feeding.

Some mornings I am larger.

The tomes have added to the index;

I wake, and there is more of me
than there was when I went to sleep.

My innards eating in the dark.

I stand naked in front of the mirror
and try to determine what has changed.

I press two fingers into my side
and the flesh devours them.

My belly button puckers and sucks into an abyss;

My eyes sink in.

Eventually everything becomes meat.

Edible.

Being fattened to be fed into a void.

Sometimes I imagine cutting away all the dysmorphic parts,

Laying each piece neatly on the bathroom tile
Just so the record is straight.


Press and seal the memories for later.

It’s really hard to enjoy the world this week now that Dolly has left it.





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