the perfect girls

I skip breakfast. call it discipline. call it power. call it whatever makes it easier to ignore the hunger gnawing at the soft parts of me. at lunch, I say I already ate. they don’t ask. they never do. I drink water like it’s a substitute for survival, pretend fullness is a matter of will. I scroll through their photos the perfect girls. thin wrists, flat stomachs, eyes like glass and skin that forgets how to bruise. they look like control. they look like everything I am not. my stomach screams but I scream louder. I tell it: you don’t deserve comfort. I tell it: beauty is pain, and pain is proof that I’m trying hard enough. every calorie is a sin I refuse to confess. every meal, an enemy wearing my mother’s voice. she was a perfect girl once I’ve seen the photos: tight waist, soft smile, legs like secrets she never taught me how to keep. people used to stop her in the street. she never said I had to be like her, but she didn’t have to. perfection lived in the silence between her glance and my second helping. why didn’t I get it? her shape, her shine, her ease in her skin? I carry her name but not her beauty— just the hunger it left behind. and I know— I know I’m starving. I know my body is shrinkin