Mid-Morning Musings

“Anorexic”

By Eavon Boland

Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.

Yes I am torching
her curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self denials.

How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers

till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.

I vomited
her hungers.
Now the bitch is burning.

I am starved and curveless.
I am skin and bone.
She has learned her lesson.

Thin as a rib
I turn in sleep.
My dreams probe

a claustrophobia
a sensuous enclosure.
How warm it was and wide

once by a warm drum,
once by the song of his breath
and in his sleeping side.

Only a little more,
only a few more days
sinless, foodless,

I will slip
back into him again
as if I had never been away.

Caged so
I will grow
angular and holy

past pain,
keeping his heart
such company

as will make me forget
in a small space
the fall

into forked dark,
into python needs
heaving to hips and breasts
and lips and heat
and sweat and fat and greed.

After an early run and a cup (or two!) or green tea, I’m in a very contemplative mood. That, and being on school vacation gives me (for better or for worse) more time to ponder over things.

It’s so amazing how we start so pure and gentle. Gentle to others, gentle to ourselves. What 3 year old do you know complains about the fat on their stomach or the shape of their thighs? They accept and they love themselves wholly, and do not even think to question or complain about what they have been given. My 4 year old cousin couldn’t give a damn about her looks, and I can tell you for a fact that I spent many of my early years running around partially or completely naked without so much as a sliver of shame or self-consciousness.

How can someone who is beautiful and HEALTHY be attacked for being fat? What is wrong here???

So my question to you is this: how does it happen? One of my favorite teachers was also one of the only people brave enough to confront me when I first started dropping an alarming amount of weight. She said to me, “Sometimes we lose something in ourselves, this sense of self-worth, of pride in what we are.” She had watched a niece struggle with anorexia, too. What do we lose, and how? Why can we not simply accept ourselves as we are? Why do we wage this constant battle against our own selves?

Why must we feed off the minute imperfections of others… Even if those others are SUPERMODELS??? What are the consequences of such behavior?

I’m not talking just about people with eating disorders. I’m talking about people everywhere. It seems no one, especially females, like themselves anymore! Is this so much to ask? Is it possible for me to ever look in the mirror and say, “Yep, that’s me! And I am 100% happy with that.”? Has our sense of self-worth just been eliminated culturally? And is there any hope that it can return?

How can this be acceptable?

This is not skinny vs. fat.

This is not pretty vs. ugly.

This is a matter, quite literally, of life and death. We are starving ourselves physically, spiritually, and emotionally as a society. What is wrong here?

And how do we stop it?

<3’s

Gabriella