I remember the first time I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the person staring back at me. Gaunt and ghostly, the girl I saw was as pale as she was thin, and when I say thin, thin is an understatement. She was flat, like a paper doll, as though there was nothing inside holding her together. Blood had been replaced by water, organs had been removed leaving cavities of empty space. The empty space made it easier to confine the rest of her insides, make them tighter, push them together until they were indistinguishable from each other and you couldn’t see where one piece of meat ended and another began. Bones became wires, pulling tired limbs out of bed every morning, moving stiffly about like a puppeteer that had become its own creation. The bags below her eyes hung for miles down her frail face, her bones protruded from her sallow frame like death had already touched her, because I suppose in a way it had.
The girl in the glass struck me, for I could see the similarities. She was me, I knew it, but unlike me she wore her hollow on the outside for the world to see. Anyone who cared to look at her would know from a glance just how empty she really was, how broken and beaten and bare she had allowed herself to become but they could stare at me for hours and think I was whole. That I was happy, that I was alive when inside there was nothing but black disease and bitter loneliness, because I remembered who that girl in the mirror used to be. I recalled her bright smiling face and that ridiculous laugh, now turned to silence and the face of repeated rejection. What used to be a plump, healthy figure, round curves of flesh over all of her surfaces, no part of her skeleton on display, had hardened to jagged stone edges, brittle breaking bones, dying from the lack of love she had given herself.
That girl was me. The sound of my heart tearing into final shreds drowned out the sobs wracked from my dry throat when I saw what had become of that girl. I saw how far she had fallen and I knew the girl I held in my mind was nothing but a memory, a ghost to haunt the one who stood before me, and as I looked down at myself, at paper legs and protruding elbows, I realized I had done this to her… to myself.
That night I cradled the girl of my memories, tried to hold her in my arms like smoke on cool water, barely touching but it was enough. We sat until dawn, unmoving, and as the sun rose, the fog that had made its home inside my head like an uninvited guest began to dissipate. The cobwebs clinging to every dark corner inside of me were dusted away, and the windows I had kept locked were thrown open, letting the warm morning sun shine into the fractures in my soul, illuminating me from the depths of the blackness I had allowed myself to become accustomed to.
So forgive yourself for every time you forgot your worth. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and if nothing else, understand this: love yourself. You are you for a reason.
the Honest Poet 