Blaring sandpaper and a smoke alarm

Your friend comes over to find you in the kitchen, in old sweatpants and a sports bra heating oatmeal on the stove.

You wonder what she thinks of your stomach, seeing its folds, if it isn't a little obscene, how it grows softer every day while you stand there, tearing pieces off of a bagel

barely chewing, constantly swallowing.

Your friend invites you over for a movie. Cancel because your feet hurt. Cancel because your fat stomach hurts. Cancel because he thinks you're beautiful and you know you aren't

Consider writing the boy you love another letter to tell him the same things reiterated from the first letter. Beg him to respond. Wonder when you stopped worrying about being

a "crazy girl." Acknowledge that becoming one feels natural, like tugging at ivy until it's uprooted, like holding the vine and watching soil fall from the roots,

back to more soil, gently.

Fear every man who looks at you. Hate every man that doesn't.

The train whistle you hear every night sounds like the cawing of an angry crow. This is not the mournful song everyone

writes about, not the lone bassoon stretching its neck into the night—this is something harsh, dogged: blaring sandpaper, a smoke alarm.

Think about getting hit by a car almost every day. Resent that you can't think of anything more creative or less passive.

But that boy. You have spent most of a year unraveling your skin for him, draping strands of it places you thought he'd notice, your teeth always chattering

like crude drums calling him to battle across the room, across state lines, across the bed. You are drawn to him like a magnet. You don't know what you are, but you suspect

it is something less permanent, something more likely to dissolve in water.

Eat the whole bagel. Lay in bed sweating. Don’t call anyone back. There’s that train whistle again: furious, obscene.

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