This is the Life
A sort-of poem that I wrote when I was in late junior high. I was probably around fourteen-years-old at the time, although the poem depicts one of many situations from one year prior.
Content
Sometimes, I feel invisible. I sit and sit and sit and sit and let my eyelids hang loose as the world passes through me. My cells are made of water. I am all liquid inside of a small, pale case. My fingers are geysers and when people walk by, I run them through their hair and gently stroke their cheeks leaving manes that drip and cheeks that glisten with tears that are not really tears. My hair is a fiber-optic lamp. It glows at the ends and lights up my face with green, pink, blue, orange, yellow, purple, green again. My liquid shoulders sag, back rounded and poor, eyes heavy and soft, fingers long and flowing, hair bathing my hollow face in green, pink, blue, orange, yellow, purple, green again. Do you see me? Because sometimes, I feel blind. I get out of the car in no particular hurry. I¶m not quite eager for my first counseling session. The waiting room is cold and overly decorated² like they are trying way too hard to be warm² and the couch is lumpy and smells like dust and pasta.
As she came out to greet me she had my info in her left hand and I saw the µcondition¶ space was penned in with the word
ANOREXIA.
Cindy (that is the shrink¶s name) led me into a small room that smelled like a bad rhinovirus. I vowed to myself not to say a word to this µCindy¶ person. One, two, three steps later I sink into the couch clutching a velvet heart-shaped pillow to my chest, pulling at a loose thread in its seam and talk and talk and talk. Cindy has tiny feet and I wonder to myself if she¶s part Chinese or if she binds them because they are so small. She keeps taking notes on a yellow legal pad and I¶m curious as to what she¶s writing. I wonder if she doodles on that big ,bad, yellow legal pad of hers. I am staring at my info sheet eyes boring into the back of that ugly word. I¶m trying to unlock an unknown part of my brain that could somehow erase those letters
and take me home, back to the comfort of my bedroom where only I know who I really am. What irritates me the most is that she doesn¶t even ask me about her suspicion. She talks about school and clothes and my family and my friends and completely shirks the whole reason why I¶m here in the first place: Because my frenzied parents sent me because of their biased friend and a biased doctor. Can a person even be anorexic when they¶re this young? Kids my age dress up like Indians and make pillow forts in their living rooms² not stand naked in front of a mirror pinching their sides. Do they? What sort of a place is this, where children are raised like irrational adults and adults behave like irrational children? If I defend myself: Guilty. If I don¶t say anything at all:
Guilty.
If I admit to lies to make them shut up:
Guilty.
It almost makes me want to laugh if I wasn¶t so distraught. My Lips Are Sealed: I had refused to go,
but of course I went. I had refused to talk, but of course I did. I had refused to cry but of course, I cried my bloody eyes out, which makes me look even more culpable. I hate this. I walked back to the car quickly the outside air freezing the tears solid on my cheeks. Sure, it hadn¶t been that bad. It was the reality of it. The bitter consciousness that my parents think I¶m mental and had sent me here in the first place. These thoughts are still ricocheting in my mind and my hands are still wiping away stray tears when we pull into the second level of Hell: My weekly weigh-in. I sit in the waiting room pulling on a jacket but then hastily shedding it back off because the doctor might interpret it as me not having enough fat to keep myself warm or something rash like that. I remember coming here to this doctor¶s office since I was a little kid. I remember looking at the colorful fish and playing in the baby-powder-smelling jungle gym with all its levers and buttons and zippers to keep my toddler-self entertained.
And now here I am: 13-years-old in this same office being amused by the same colorful fish accused of anorexia. I have learned to just zip myself up, cauterize all character until I walk out the door. They look for signs, you see. If I am bubbly they think I¶m faking. If I am forlorn they offer sympathetic smiles. There is just no winning when you are a child and the whole world stands tall against you. Basic Routine: Urine sample check my height and step onto the scale. I feel cold metal beneath my feet as the nurse adjusts the rail. Shakes her head and writes stuff down sends me back to change. And leaves me waiting and anticipating and wondering if they¶re sane. Stare at the fish while they talk to Dad of my headway or decent.
As I sit here writing this damn poem to let my anger vent. Dad is talking to me as we drive to Rowan¶s house. His voice is wet sandpaper, as if he has a terrible chest-cold even when he¶s tip-top. I imagine his lungs crackling with every word, blistering paint on a sunny porch deck, and I have to look out the window with my jaw clenched tight to avoid lashing out, shrieking and spitting needless venom. I¶m trying to pinpoint exactly how I met Rowan. All I can come up with is that my mom and his mom are friends. My mom is his mom¶s best friend. She is miserably ill. How tormenting for Rowan and his brothers to have to grow up with such a loving yet distorted mother. I clench my fists in anger ²seething, wretched anger² because her condition led my parents to believe that I am sick as well. It¶s not my fault I¶m thin. It¶s not my fault that my taste buds are still-young and that I¶ll only eat my preferred foods. In my 8th grade science class we all took this test where we put a slip of paper on our tongues and if you can taste the bitterness of the paper,
your taste buds are sensitive to, well, taste. I could taste it. It. Was. Disgusting. It tasted like rancid 7-Up. Slenderness runs in both sides of the family. So they can¶t peg that onto their ever-so-long list of signs that I¶m anorexic, or bulimic, or whatever. I swear: if that woman tries to force one more particle of food down my throat, trying to taste the hot dogs by watching me consume them, I will gouge out her eyes with my spindly fingers. Misery loves company. She convinced my parents that I was just like her, simply so she could have a partner in crime. If that seems childish and unlikely, it¶s because it is. This woman is a forty-year-old adolescent, wrapped up in her Disneyland-ambient house a sinewy insect caught in a spider¶s web. She lives for Disney. Tinkerbelle is her favorite. It¶s disgusting. Doesn¶t she see her ribs jutting out in the mirror, her hipbones creating a cereal bowl in her abdomen? Where are all of her organs? Doesn¶t she find it peculiar that she still shops in the little girl¶s section of Wal-Mart, keeping herself covered in cartoon-covered cotton shirts, jeans with sparkles and knock-off pink Chucks?
This time, they found the weight. I had it wrapped up in my sweatshirt in the room and, when I came back from urinating into a cup, the nurse had switched rooms and had picked up the clothes cradling the weight. I had to use a metal tape-measurer, the one I found when frantically rummaging through the car¶s trunk, because I had forgotten the real one at home. The five-pounder unscrewed from my mother¶s old hand-weights that I have been hiding in the crotch of my underwear every week when I am weighed. Without it, I have lost five pounds. Give or take. I wore it anyway clipped to the front of my elastic waistband. A single pound is better than nothing. Except this time, she knew. I waddled onto the scale and she gave me this look of the most profound, shameful sorrow before stepping behind me to undo my blue gown. My underwear today just had to be a thong. One of the only ones I own, of course. With Snoopy¶s face painted thick on the front. Why wouldn¶t it be? At this point, I don¶t even give a fuck standing there while she frisks my groin before releasing me to the wolves. My pride has been a lost cause from the beginning.
As she came out to greet me she had my info in her left hand and I saw the µcondition¶ space was penned in with the word
ANOREXIA.
Cindy (that is the shrink¶s name) led me into a small room that smelled like a bad rhinovirus. I vowed to myself not to say a word to this µCindy¶ person. One, two, three steps later I sink into the couch clutching a velvet heart-shaped pillow to my chest, pulling at a loose thread in its seam and talk and talk and talk. Cindy has tiny feet and I wonder to myself if she¶s part Chinese or if she binds them because they are so small. She keeps taking notes on a yellow legal pad and I¶m curious as to what she¶s writing. I wonder if she doodles on that big ,bad, yellow legal pad of hers. I am staring at my info sheet eyes boring into the back of that ugly word. I¶m trying to unlock an unknown part of my brain that could somehow erase those letters
and take me home, back to the comfort of my bedroom where only I know who I really am. What irritates me the most is that she doesn¶t even ask me about her suspicion. She talks about school and clothes and my family and my friends and completely shirks the whole reason why I¶m here in the first place: Because my frenzied parents sent me because of their biased friend and a biased doctor. Can a person even be anorexic when they¶re this young? Kids my age dress up like Indians and make pillow forts in their living rooms² not stand naked in front of a mirror pinching their sides. Do they? What sort of a place is this, where children are raised like irrational adults and adults behave like irrational children? If I defend myself: Guilty. If I don¶t say anything at all:
Guilty.
If I admit to lies to make them shut up:
Guilty.
It almost makes me want to laugh if I wasn¶t so distraught. My Lips Are Sealed: I had refused to go,
but of course I went. I had refused to talk, but of course I did. I had refused to cry but of course, I cried my bloody eyes out, which makes me look even more culpable. I hate this. I walked back to the car quickly the outside air freezing the tears solid on my cheeks. Sure, it hadn¶t been that bad. It was the reality of it. The bitter consciousness that my parents think I¶m mental and had sent me here in the first place. These thoughts are still ricocheting in my mind and my hands are still wiping away stray tears when we pull into the second level of Hell: My weekly weigh-in. I sit in the waiting room pulling on a jacket but then hastily shedding it back off because the doctor might interpret it as me not having enough fat to keep myself warm or something rash like that. I remember coming here to this doctor¶s office since I was a little kid. I remember looking at the colorful fish and playing in the baby-powder-smelling jungle gym with all its levers and buttons and zippers to keep my toddler-self entertained.
And now here I am: 13-years-old in this same office being amused by the same colorful fish accused of anorexia. I have learned to just zip myself up, cauterize all character until I walk out the door. They look for signs, you see. If I am bubbly they think I¶m faking. If I am forlorn they offer sympathetic smiles. There is just no winning when you are a child and the whole world stands tall against you. Basic Routine: Urine sample check my height and step onto the scale. I feel cold metal beneath my feet as the nurse adjusts the rail. Shakes her head and writes stuff down sends me back to change. And leaves me waiting and anticipating and wondering if they¶re sane. Stare at the fish while they talk to Dad of my headway or decent.
As I sit here writing this damn poem to let my anger vent. Dad is talking to me as we drive to Rowan¶s house. His voice is wet sandpaper, as if he has a terrible chest-cold even when he¶s tip-top. I imagine his lungs crackling with every word, blistering paint on a sunny porch deck, and I have to look out the window with my jaw clenched tight to avoid lashing out, shrieking and spitting needless venom. I¶m trying to pinpoint exactly how I met Rowan. All I can come up with is that my mom and his mom are friends. My mom is his mom¶s best friend. She is miserably ill. How tormenting for Rowan and his brothers to have to grow up with such a loving yet distorted mother. I clench my fists in anger ²seething, wretched anger² because her condition led my parents to believe that I am sick as well. It¶s not my fault I¶m thin. It¶s not my fault that my taste buds are still-young and that I¶ll only eat my preferred foods. In my 8th grade science class we all took this test where we put a slip of paper on our tongues and if you can taste the bitterness of the paper,
your taste buds are sensitive to, well, taste. I could taste it. It. Was. Disgusting. It tasted like rancid 7-Up. Slenderness runs in both sides of the family. So they can¶t peg that onto their ever-so-long list of signs that I¶m anorexic, or bulimic, or whatever. I swear: if that woman tries to force one more particle of food down my throat, trying to taste the hot dogs by watching me consume them, I will gouge out her eyes with my spindly fingers. Misery loves company. She convinced my parents that I was just like her, simply so she could have a partner in crime. If that seems childish and unlikely, it¶s because it is. This woman is a forty-year-old adolescent, wrapped up in her Disneyland-ambient house a sinewy insect caught in a spider¶s web. She lives for Disney. Tinkerbelle is her favorite. It¶s disgusting. Doesn¶t she see her ribs jutting out in the mirror, her hipbones creating a cereal bowl in her abdomen? Where are all of her organs? Doesn¶t she find it peculiar that she still shops in the little girl¶s section of Wal-Mart, keeping herself covered in cartoon-covered cotton shirts, jeans with sparkles and knock-off pink Chucks?
This time, they found the weight. I had it wrapped up in my sweatshirt in the room and, when I came back from urinating into a cup, the nurse had switched rooms and had picked up the clothes cradling the weight. I had to use a metal tape-measurer, the one I found when frantically rummaging through the car¶s trunk, because I had forgotten the real one at home. The five-pounder unscrewed from my mother¶s old hand-weights that I have been hiding in the crotch of my underwear every week when I am weighed. Without it, I have lost five pounds. Give or take. I wore it anyway clipped to the front of my elastic waistband. A single pound is better than nothing. Except this time, she knew. I waddled onto the scale and she gave me this look of the most profound, shameful sorrow before stepping behind me to undo my blue gown. My underwear today just had to be a thong. One of the only ones I own, of course. With Snoopy¶s face painted thick on the front. Why wouldn¶t it be? At this point, I don¶t even give a fuck standing there while she frisks my groin before releasing me to the wolves. My pride has been a lost cause from the beginning.
