I am in love with a girl... a girl who is afraid of breakfast,

who brews coffee in the morning like gasoline feeding a starving engine.

 

She waits in the kitchen for the one thing she can choke down so early.

 

I smile at her,

and she smiles back.

Her coffee sits on the countertop, untouched and stagnating,

 

I am in love with a girl who always smiles back.

 

Eating breakfast was never a matter of life or death before we met,

until “how is your day?” became “are you ok?” became “what’ve you eaten today?” became disparaging glances in my direction,

as if I didn’t ask myself the same things over coffee each morning.

Maybe she’s just not a morning person.

 

I tell them that we are two early risers dancing with death and a Keurig to keep warm.

 

I am in love with a girl who is always cold,

who sleepwalks to the kitchen wrapped in blankets like an astronaut clawing her way through empty space.

She’s drawn to the frozen light of the refrigerator like a moth to a flame,

counting calories instead of sheep.

 

I am in love with a girl who never sleeps.

Reality is a nightmare some god has deemed her unworthy of waking up from.

 

and I keep telling myself that it’s just another morning

antidepressants over breakfast,

growing clothes, shrinking skin

as if her skeleton may mount and jump out of her body at the mere mention of a meal.

 

but I’m more afraid... of the skeletons left in the closet.

 

Flashbacks of boys with x-ray vision who know only what they can see,

He saw love as two breasts and a ribcage,

She zipped up her hoodie to conceal the exposed bones of her ribcage

pounding on the bars of a prison cell — “Your ribcage,

 

is not a cadaver,” I tell her,

“Your body does not control you,” I tell her,

“Your body is a gift," I tell her.

 

But, "What’s in a gift if there’s nothing left to give?"

 

I am in love with a girl who has all but… given up.

 

I carry her body from room to room and couch to couch, but every step that we take like a slow dancer’s tango…  is another step in the wrong direction,

 

She still two-steps backwards to the bathroom scale by herself.

119,

118,

116.5:

It’s the countdown that never gets any slower, but she doesn’t seem to mind.

115

Why do mornings have the capacity to paralyze a teenage girl until she’s nothing but caffeine and deceit?

114

Why does this body reject the voice of reason like fingers down my throat?

113

When did bones take on a mind of their own?

112

How can this disease have the audacity to tell me that it loves me?

that my body is its gift,

when all I ever want to do is disappear.

110

No one ever told me that anorexia is not a magic trick,

Or an eating disorder a cloak of invisibility.

 

109.5

 

She is eating me alive.

 

I don’t know how many more breakfasts we have left to skip,

 

so I smile at her,

and she smiles back.

The mirror is cold, and my coffee sits on the countertop, freezing and untouched.

 

And I need her like a disease needs a body.

 

I am in love with a girl who doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror anymore,

and neither do I.