Things I'll Never Tell You

I wonder if you ever see her in the reflection of my eyes. Does her ghost lay in the space between us? Is that why I can’t cross it? She’s not dead, just gone. I know. You visit her to catch up, reminisce, remember. Every time you do, you come back to me with your heart heavy. Her arms are a cemetery, a reminder of what once was, of what could never last. I pick the cobwebs from your hair, run my hands down your back to remind myself that you are still warm, still alive, still here. Her ghost lingers long enough to make me wonder if you spent last night looking at resurrection spells. I would cut my own skin if you needed blood for the ritual. Sometimes I feel like I already have. I hope, someday, you talk about me the same way you talk about her.

It took me twenty years to learn how to love myself. I auctioned myself off to funhouse mirrors and fad diets, illnesses and magic pills. You come along, fingers trailing my spine as if I’m a novel you can’t wait to read. You turn my skin into a canvas, my body into a map. Your fingers explore every inch, finding caverns in the hollows of my collarbones and hills in the curves of my thighs. I feel your lips on mine, on my neck, on my wrist, on the inside of my leg. When we make it to my bedroom, I reach for the light switch, instinctual and subconscious. You stop me, your hand on mine as you say you want to see every inch of me. So, we leave the lights on, and let the electricity between us threaten to blow the bulbs out.

A glance around the room, looking for someone else who feels as out of place as me. Isn’t this how we always find each other? For another night, we pretend we are strangers. For one more night, we are just people in the right place at the right time. The glow of party lights make it feel like a technicolor dream, your eyes looking back at me. People dance around us, their arms swaying and swinging, nudging me forward, closer to you. Or maybe I’m a planchette on an Ouija board, not ready to admit I want to be closer to you. This is reckless but harmless in the sweetest way. I want you to want me to stay.

When the fat girl says her lunch was a clementine and her breakfast was black coffee, no one blinks an eye. When the fat girl spends three hours at the gym and comes home to crawl into bed without dinner, no one leaves a plate for her. When the fat girl becomes the skinny girl, her body falling apart like ashes from a cigarette, everyone calls her pretty. I have spent the past ten years trying to convince myself that I can be both the fat girl and the pretty girl. I have tried to lessen the weight of these adjectives by surrounding myself with bright people who do not care about numbers or sizes. I’m on a plane coming home from Florida, and it’s late and raining outside as I turn on a movie about eating disorders. Here’s the thing, I never said I had an eating disorder. When the fat girl skips meals, people call it power. When the fat girl never stops running, people call it strength. I am on this plane watching this girl turn into tissue paper. I can feel the bathroom tiles beneath my knees, the shame of not being able to make myself sick. When the fat girl starts to turn to dust, people compare her to glitter. When the fat girl self-destructs, people say she’s like fireworks. The fat girl is dying, but at least she’s so pretty. I am watching this girl in this movie and thinking that I know that feeling, the feeling of water on an empty stomach, the taste of saltines for the first time all day, the shame that you’re eating anything today. And suddenly I am not watching the movie. I am thirteen years old, sitting in a doctor’s office, talking about how I need to stop eating. I am taking long bike rides to avoid meals and only eating Fiber One brownies. I am fifteen years old, tracking calories for a health project, trying to keep the number below five hundred. I am watching myself in the mirror, turning and sucking and pulling until I am red all over. I am seventeen years old, letting my body auction itself off to an illness just so I won’t have to be its keeper. I never said I had an eating disorder. Now, though, on this plane, in this seat by the window, I see my reflection in this girl’s face in this movie about eating disorders. And I am crying. It’s like I am the haunted house, and anorexia is the ghost that will not go. No matter who comes to visit or even who comes to stay, she is always there, waiting and watching. I am out at dinner with a nice boy, but my hands are shaking each time I pick up my fork. I have a salad in front of me while he eats steak bigger than my eyes, and yet, I still feel too large. When he tells me that I am beautiful and stunning and gorgeous, the words feel like paper, weightless against me. I have never been allowed to be the canvas for such descriptions, and this ghost will not let them stick. I never said I had an eating disorder, and even if I had, I would have said I was well past it. But even as I get off this plane, with the movie long finished and done, I am counting calories like tally marks, each one cutting into my skin. When the fat girl stops eating, no one ever notices. When the fat girl relapses, no one ever notices.

I pick her name out of your hair like spider webs, invisible thread wrapped up around you long after she has moved on. Her bobby pins are littered on your nightstand, like the legs of spiders left behind so she could make her great escape. I want to tell you that she’s a black widow, that she will never be yours and only yours, not in the ways you want her to be. You don’t want to hear that. I see her in the glossy black of your eyes, the image of her burned into your mind even when you act like you’re fine. I suppose there’s something enticing about spider webs. Maybe it’s their beauty or their magic, how they hang in the air like your own personal star. I want to tell you that spider webs don’t last, at least not in the pretty places. I want to tell you that spider webs will only stay in places that no one comes to visit, places that no one wants to visit. You don’t want to hear that. There are marks all over your body from where she bit you, pinched you. My fingertips brush the red blossom on your neck. Hours, days, weeks later, I run my fingers through your hair, and there are no more cob webs. Your eyes are bright blue and hold no reflection of the girl who was once your world, so I leave you for the night and go home. You call me the next morning, and say that it’s a miracle, that you thought she was gone. But spiders don’t ever really disappear. They always come back when their artwork is long gone. She makes you a cage, but she calls it a web, out of apologies and promises and she’s so sorry that she left like that. But you’re the fly caught in her grasp, because you nod along and you take her back.

You were my night sky, glittering and magical, always there but forever untouchable. Your eyes were stars in the dark of my bedroom, your body with its own gravitational pull. Touching you was like being the first person on the moon, my fingertips laying down flags and claiming you as mine. But the moon was never a place to stay, only a place to visit. That was your choice, not mine. You whisper her name into the hollow bend of my neck, casually dropping a meteor into my heart. And I know you didn’t mean to, but you have stolen the oxygen from my lungs with no warning. I can see the way you see her, the two of you dancing in the lens of my telescope. Her smile is your little dipper, and her voice, a galaxy to get lost in. Her scars are shooting stars, marks across her milky skin that make her seem mysterious and beautiful, so beautiful. Her freckles are constellations, and you read your horoscope in the curve of her shoulder every morning. I stopped trying to breathe when you disappeared, pulled into the black hole of her arms. She is your northern star now, and I am a galaxy waiting – hoping – to be discovered.

When I was younger, my mother told me to find someone who would look at the stars with me. I spend my time caught up in things that I can’t ever truly understand. It’s why I take philosophy classes and sit at the edge of the ocean in the dark. Do you remember the night we laid together in the grass and watched the stars fall from the sky? I made a wish on every single one. But I suppose I'm not the kind of girl who gets miracles like that, or maybe the stars thought your wishes were more important. You tell me about this girl in your life, how she is everything you never thought to ask for. And we don’t look at the stars anymore, because this girl is your whole sky. Her smile is your personal little dipper, and when she laughs, it’s like one of those stars has fallen down to your ears. Her freckles are constellations, and you read your horoscope in the curve of her shoulder every morning. Her scars are shooting stars, marks across her skin from tragedies that make her seem even more beautiful. She is your northern star. And you were mine.