For all the girls standing in the line

For the bathroom.

For all the girls,

Like myself.

With a gaping black hole in the back of my throat

Waiting for the next storm to come.

With an overflowing river of anger and loathing

Filling my veins.

Running into an empty bathroom after lunch

To rid of the guilt and the weight

Of everyday life.

Spending more time within those stall walls

Than in the warming sun each day,

I beg for another chance at a normal life.

Again and again I ask why I must live this way

And how I can change it.

Can this black void of a body only be filled

With the pain of my past,

With the thoughts of my lost childhood

Because I was too busy looking in the mirror

And losing my mind and my waistline?

Everyone else knows that I’m no less of a human

Than the next person

But my humanity drowns in the vomit of regret.

I was deprived of the feelings of acceptance,

Of beauty,

Of self-worth.

I self-taught that the size of my waistline

Equals the size of my self-esteem-

A size zero-

An ideal picture of love.

 

My life was as dark as that black hole throat of mine.

I did not see the warmth I casted when I entered a room,

The smiles on the faces of others who appreciated my presence,

The conversations cherished in the late night hours

Where we would throw up

Peace signs

But then I used those same two fingers to

Purge the peace from my being.

My eyes sunken in from the weight of

The ways I beat myself up every day.

My stomach a vast tomb

Filled to the brim

Of the love strained from my heart.

 

But I was pulled from that tornado,

That ghost-filled cyclone of death

And blackness

And emptiness

And despair;

My mother showed her glowing face

Her beating heart

Beating for the both of us.

The ghosts held my throat back

My mother pulling with greater force

I finally saw the light

That I was wanted in this world.

My personality had changed in that tornado

It was bleak,

Dark,

Depressing to say the least.

The bubbles that used to form when I laughed

Had all popped and choked me.

But coming out of there showed me something

I thought I’d never see again:

The colors of life.

For all the girls standing in line

For the bathroom:

Turn around.

Walk away.

The color is there.

The light is waiting.

And it always will.