Super rough draft
You’re stuck in-between childish freedom and suddenly being too cool.
Why is it so hard to be yourself?
Why is it is so easy to tear others down?
All emotions bubble to the top and nothing seems to calm them down.
It won’t always be that way.
Listen to me, baby bunny, because hindsight is always 20/20, and presently you’re blind to all you have to offer.
Thirteen is just another year, and they only get better from here.
Rough draft
It is strange to be alone with your thoughts for so long.
There is no one to interrupt.
Just you and the sound of a dog snoring softly in the corner.
This is your life now.
This is what it means to save lives.
The Earth is slowly being reborn, and I wait.
I want to write about Mexico.
About what it was like to return somewhere after 22 years and feel like you’d always been there.
I want to write about Mexico, but my thoughts are scattered among mountains, and cactus. They are running rampant with stray dogs along winding roads lined with palm trees and pop up food stands.
How do I make sense of everything that happened in the two weeks that stretched out like an eternity.
Things run slower in the motherland. There is an urgency, and need for immediate gratification that doesn’t exist there. Time has slowed down. Or maybe it’s that time is just running along at the right pace and we’re running too fast in the States?
Either way I came home tired.
And that title is misleading.
My thoughts have always been a jumble that predominantly exists in English. A place where Spanish shows up like a fond friend who’s mostly traveling and cannot be tied down.
No pos guau.
When I close my eyes and think of Mexico all I see is color.
Mexico is the brightest blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds.
It is dark green mountains rising up towards it.
Red dusty earth.
The golden tan skin of people who rarely have the sun hidden from them.
When I close my eyes and think of Mexico, all I can think of are ghost stories, bygone times, and memories that don’t belong to me.
I think of blood that is a stranger to me and a longing to know who they were.
The family gathered, their aunt had come home. The baby of the family, who’d been away for so long had come back for a visit.
Naturally a pig was slaughtered and there was feasting and drinking and singing.
I watched my cousins clasp her hands and ask her one by one if she remembered them, if she knew their names. She nodded until she was overwhelmed by the amount of people, and questions.
I watched a cousin break down and cry as he tried to reconcile his memory of my mother– strong, vibrant, full of life, with the fragile, quiet, woman that stood in front of him.
I sat with her, holding her hand as the tears slid down her cheeks, for reasons I don’t think she understood.
When I think of this trip, I think of a loved one saying, “goodbye.”
There are levels.
As with all things.
There are levels to fatness.
If you’ve ever been fat, if you are fat, if you’ve only ever been fat, you know that these levels exist. Skinny people don’t know. They don’t realize the differences. They see fat, and they think everyone is the same, like white people assuming that the every tan person speaking Spanish is Mexican. We’re all the same to them until we’re not.
I blame Instagram.
I blame the Rom-Com ™️.
I blame romance novels.
They have fed us the lie of the acceptable fatness, while society has told us that there is no such thing, but oh, they’re “body positive.”
We live in the extreme of poor Bridget Jones bemoaning her fatness at what I’m guessing is at maximum a size 14 (a size I haven’t been since I was in the 8th grade) and having to suffer through the indignity of My 600 Pound Life and the Biggest Loser. We live in the side-eyed whispers of “at least I’m not that fat,” or “kill me if I ever get that fat.”
But what is that fat? Where do we draw the line of acceptable fat and unacceptable fat?
It’s become a game of “I know it, when I see it.” I know it when I see pictures of body positive fat girls and I wish to myself that I was that kind of fat. I know it when I see pictures of bed-ridden people who have gained too much weight to move under their own power. I hope to never be that fat and at the same time, I hate being someone who looks at someone else and prays to never look like them.
It makes me wonder how many people have seen me walk by and prayed the same thing.
Acceptable fat is cute. Acceptable fat is extra weight in just the right places. It’s rounded hips and thick, dimple free thighs. It’s smooth, evenly toned skin and only the slightest of belly budge.
It is the true definition of a “tummy” and never ever a belly.
Bellies are disgusting.
Acceptable fat is having large breasts that don’t droop and without a fat back to accompany them.
Acceptable fat is still managing to have a smaller waist in comparison to your hips and bust.
Acceptable fat is using Marilyn Monroe as a Plus. Size. Icon.
“Marilyn Monroe was a size 14, love me, love my curves,” she says as she justifies eating another doughnut from the box in the office kitchen.”
This is the picture of acceptable fat and it’s a fucking lie.
In my life I have never been acceptable fat.
Even when I was much smaller than what I am now.
I am not acceptable fat, even after losing 100 lbs.
I am not acceptable fat even when I’ve taken n00ds and tried to imagine myself as a sexy, desirable woman.
And the scary thing is, that so many women and men have the same thoughts. Regardless of what size they are, how much they lose, and how much they gain.
Their body is unacceptable.
Our bodies are unacceptable.
How do we become acceptable?
I cannot envision the rest of my life compulsively counting my calories and yelling at myself for going above what is already an unhealthy limit.
If this were a smaller person, they would be yelled at and counseled for possibly being anorexic.
But because I am the weight that I am, the size that I am, no one would even question it.
No one should live on less than a thousand calories a day.
It’s unhealthy.
But I hate myself for reaching a thousand. I hate myself for being hungry. I hate myself for being hungrier when I work out. I want to be able to work out and not feel the need to eat more. I want to get through the day without feeling the need to eat at all.
And I’m scared that I cannot sustain this.
My greatest fear is that I completely break and I get to a point where I am fatter than I have ever been and I’ll never come back from it.
I think my greatest problem is that I don’t want to be acceptable fat; my problem is that I simply want to be, acceptable.
Time changes.
It charges on.
I cannot tame it.
I mourn for the heat of summer.
It is recklessness, freedom, and wild abandon.
I grow nostalgic for the endless days that melt one right into one another.
But the time has come for night to spread, to grow, to take hold.
There’s a chill creeping into the air and the waning light plays tricks on my eyes.
The dying season is upon us.
The world is ablaze in red and orange, the smoldering embers of a blazing summer.
Something sinister lurks in the shadows– primordial, ancient, accustom to this dance and ready to begin once more.
This is her time.
She whispers in the wind and goosebumps cover my skin.
Autumn is come.
The Secret Life of Pandas 