#tw: eating problems – @astagesetforcatastrophe on Tumblr

You think biology has stopped forgiving you. And each year the moon slips 1.5 inches farther from Earth, you tell me that you’re always one step farther from loving yourself and two steps closer to finding your own ghost. Years from now, you say even the palaeontologist who tries to assemble your fossils will give up when they find that even your backbone has given into being more liquid than bone. That the left hemisphere of your brain lit itself on fire when you were ten, and no longer remembers how to use “love” and “myself” in the same context anymore. I know you are all bruises and thunder from beating yourself at night in your sleep, pinching your hips and thighs until your blood has stopped running and started howling instead. Five years ago, your mother began noticing that the carton of milk always seemed to refill itself and started hiding all the measuring cups in places she knew you couldn’t reach. And after spending four hours lifting the fork to your mouth with both hands shaking so hard they’d think you were trying to balance a whale’s heart on your fingertips, I watched you struggle not to turn your stomach inside out over toilet bowls the way sea-stars do. Baby, I know you hate this body. I know you have forgotten what the stars taste like because you’ve been so caught up with the idea that you must shrink until your thighs can hold the universe between its spaces before you can call your skin and bones something like home. But please, let today be different. Tell me you are learning. Learning how to rearrange the bones of the words “my”, "love”, “I”, and “body” until it sounds less like broken English and something more like an apology. Because that’s always the first step.

astagesetforcatastrophe, the first step