Lately I have stopped being able to recognize my face as a sum of its parts. When I stand in front of the mirror, pinching soft skin between accusatory fingers, the face that looks back is unrecognizable, each feature isolated like pieces of a disjointed puzzle. My reflection smiles at me and parts her lips, her teeth yellow and desiccated, smoke tangled in her hair like thread. At some point I will have to choose: the swell of my stomach beneath my sweater and the ungainly existence of skin or watching as my hair covers the floor like carpet and my teeth decay before my eyes, peeling away from bloody gums, rattling in my skull like dominoes. Worldliness tightens around me like a length of rope and I clutch at stiff collars with nicotine-stained fingers, always hungry, always cold. I begin to hide behind baggy pants and baggier sweaters. I skip breakfast, sometimes dinner, and I never finish lunch. I familiarize my tongue with a set of excuses: I’m not hungry, I feel sick, I ate before I got here. I turn pain into elegance, romanticize it with eloquent syntax and flowery language, and hope that maybe, if I write about it enough, it will grow bored and vanish, curl into the air and dissipate like steam on a snowy day.

It doesn’t.

***

Sometimes I wonder if karma comes in the form of dreams, plaguing my nights in retaliation for every sharp comment, every overlooked cruelty. Some nights I dream of delicate, fishlike bones jutting from my abdomen like teeth. In my half-lucid haze I inspect the transparent skin with a sort of transfixed horror, the dry, brittle spines pierced through flaps of loose skin. I wake from these nightmares with clammy hands and a raw throat and pull up my shirt in the darkened glass of the hallway mirror, tracing my finger over the outline of my ribs, the unbroken skin of my stomach, waiting for my heart to slow.

These hollow nights haunt me, nausea pressing at the back of my throat each time food touches my tongue. I begin to surreptitiously empty my lunch, burying sandwiches and rice beneath stale mozzarella sticks and bloody spills of marinara. My hair comes away in clumps, tangling nooselike around freezing hands, and sometimes when I stand black spots dance across my vision and the world rushes at me in a dizzying blur. I slip out of calc to examine my rib cage in the bathroom mirror and this time when I look into smudged glass, my reflection does not smirk. I am empty, she says, baring her rotting teeth. Fill me, fill me, fill me. I do not know if she wants words or the saran-wrapped desserts piled heavy in the depths of the nearby trash can, but I know that I can offer her neither. 

***

There is a Greek myth about a man named Erysichthon of Thessaly. For the crime of desecrating a sacred oak, the goddess Demeter cursed him with insatiable hunger. The more he ate, the hungrier he got. He sold all of his possessions to buy food, even forcing his own daughter, the princess of Thessaly, into slavery. Eventually, he ate himself, every bit of his own flesh, until nothing at all remained. 

At the time, I thought this was simply a funny story, one of countless parables about the price of angering the gods. But this is the essence of pain: complex, ineffable, a concept so overwritten, so universally understood, that any truth-based, surface-level telling of it is inherently trite, fundamentally shallow. It must exist only as a secondary concept, the undercurrent of a narrative that purports to be about something else, because pain is not the presence of a feeling but the absence of many; a kind of incurable, unfulfillable hunger that only leaves you wanting more. 

No matter how empty I feel, my resolve is always stronger than my hunger. I always need perfection more than absolution.

***

Recently, I read an article titled French Women Smokers say: “Better Dead than Fat.” This, I think, is a succinct version of the truth: there comes a time in every girl’s life when you must decide whether you fear death more than you fear this mirror god, this hateful creature trapped behind fracturing glass, spitting her absences like rivers of acid.

Pain, I know now, is not glamorous. Not cigarettes and short skirts and tan, thin legs, not crop tops and slim waists and low rise jeans. It’s thinning hair, bald spots, lips cracked dry and bleeding. Cigarette smoke hanging on all my clothes like car exhaust, acrid and bitter and choking. Sometimes I’m not sure whether writing serves as an outlet for this pain or its corroding core but I do it anyway, the endless cycle begun anew by scrolling through other girls’ prose, marveling at how much more poetically they use the same words, wondering why I can’t quite do the same. Wondering if it’s because I don’t hurt enough.

I decide I need to be more empty, more hollow, to make space for the words. I chew my cheek until the coppery taste of metal and rain saturates my tongue and pinch at tender skin until drops of blood well like tears. I tell myself that this is art, that I am art. 

And I hope that one day, I will be enough.

Megan Xing is a writer from New York. Her work appears in The Lumiere Review and has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She is an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers’ Workshop and the Kenyon Young Writers’ Workshop. She is currently a sophomore at Emory University.