2021 Saran wrap / Nesting dolls
I remember as a kid people asking me why I was always smiling.
In the mirror of this dorm room I don't see my smile.
In the mirror I see my body. My hips, my waist.
His words scream at the body in front of me.
Like saran wrap they cling to me, and it tightens its grip. Stretched too thin across my stomach, folds gapping across my chest, holding my arms at my sides, twisting between my legs. It tightens against my ribs, pressed against parallel bones inhaling.
I try to shrink myself, try to suck in my stomach, try to tilt my hips, try to arch my waist.
I look in the mirror and see my body as the pieces you call desirable.
Like a russian nesting doll that fits too tight, the silhouette of the girl I am not traps me.
He looks at me the way he looks at the girls on his phone.
And I contort myself to be them. The perfect eigen version of appeal.
The too-tight too-loose nesting doll laughs at me.
The mirror draws my eyes again and again to where her wood cuts into me, again and again to the gaps between my body and hers.
She blurs constantly. There is no answer here. There is only comparison to a consumable that sits in resentful comparison to every girl I walk by.
“I think I’d like to fuck her at some point,” he says to me about the girl I am not.
And I am running down the street.
Inhaling sharply under pools of too white street light in this parking lot, the ground slick,
The northeast winter pushing against me, forcing me to feel my own warmth.
My feet beneath me.
I am out of breath, bent over, the air in my lungs the only thing that is real.
I unstick the saran wrap. I rub at the indents it leaves across my skin.
My body drifts alone in space.
And I inhale.
2021 Saran wrap / Nesting dolls
I remember as a kid people asking me why I was always smiling.
In the mirror of this dorm room I don't see my smile.
In the mirror I see my body. My hips, my waist.
His words scream at the body in front of me.
Like saran wrap they cling to me, and it tightens its grip. Stretched too thin across my stomach, folds gapping across my chest, holding my arms at my sides, twisting between my legs. It tightens against my ribs, pressed against parallel bones inhaling.
I try to shrink myself, try to suck in my stomach, try to tilt my hips, try to arch my waist.
I look in the mirror and see my body as the pieces you call desirable.
Like a russian nesting doll that fits too tight, the silhouette of the girl I am not traps me.
He looks at me the way he looks at the girls on his phone.
And I contort myself to be them. The perfect eigen version of appeal.
The too-tight too-loose nesting doll laughs at me.
The mirror draws my eyes again and again to where her wood cuts into me, again and again to the gaps between my body and hers.
She blurs constantly. There is no answer here. There is only comparison to a consumable that sits in resentful comparison to every girl I walk by.
“I think I’d like to fuck her at some point,” he says to me about the girl I am not.
And I am running down the street.
Inhaling sharply under pools of too white street light in this parking lot, the ground slick,
The northeast winter pushing against me, forcing me to feel my own warmth.
My feet beneath me.
I am out of breath, bent over, the air in my lungs the only thing that is real.
I unstick the saran wrap. I rub at the indents it leaves across my skin.
My body drifts alone in space.
And I inhale.