Twenty years ago
I’m sitting on the couch in my living room
Eagerly waiting to turn five
I sit between my parents
Facing the television
Concentrating not on the screen
But on the VCR below
Gazing in anticipation at the luminescent green numbers on the display
Tonight, I will gain another year to my life
And like Cinderella, when the clock strikes midnight
I will be transformed out of this
Chubby, ugly little body into
That of A Beautiful Girl
At that time I will possess
The type of beauty that will make others
Stop and stare in my direction
They’ll tell my parents
“Your daughter is so beautiful”
And I will finally know what it feels like not to be invisible
The clock reads “12:00”
And I sprint to the bathroom
Feverishly flipping the light switch
As I turn to face myself in the mirror
The face that stares back at me etched with disappointment
When I realize that I am the same as I was before
Five has brought no new changes
I stretch the skin on my face, pulling at its squish
Wondering why it’s still so round
I look down at my hands
Still small, still ending in fat fingers
My hands migrate to my abdomen
And I feel the small swell that I am convinced
Is larger than the tummies of everyone else my age
I am left with the truth that I am still me
I return to the living room
Walking slowly as if leading the procession
At the funeral for my aspirations
Realizing now that I will never look like A Beautiful Girl
And pondering all that that means
A Beautiful Girl has friends
Her parents don’t fight every other day
She doesn’t cry at church when she has to go to Sunday school
She doesn’t cry when a stranger looks at her
She doesn’t cry at night because she’s afraid kidnappers will sneak through her window
Or because she was ripped out of sleep by a nightmare that her mom was dead
She just exists with the ease and grace
That I do not possess
I realize that I am stuck in this vessel
That I will never be who I want to be
Because I will always look like me
My parents meet my look of anguish with joy
“Are you excited it’s your birthday?” they ask
“I thought I’d look different,” I say
They laugh at my childish naivety
Thinking it’s so cute that
I could believe something so preposterous
Twenty years later
I still reside in this body
I still cry
I still hate church and strangers
And I still don’t feel like A Beautiful Girl
The kind that walks through life seemingly so happy about everything
I am still different
But instead of rebuking this
I’ve embraced it
Because now I know The Beautiful Girls
Haven’t seen the shit I’ve seen
I’ve walked the circles of Hell
And they are true to their name in every fashion
I have clawed my way through their treachery
Ripped and bit and scratched through the layers of torment
Until my fingers were left raw and bleeding
Those girls weren’t thought of as freaks in school
They didn’t have
A born-again bipolar father
Who didn’t take his medication
Who told me I wasn’t pretty
Whose favorite nickname for me was
“Bitch-just-like-your-mother”
They never sat on a couch at the age of twelve
Having to hear “your brother’s dead”
When hearing the news of their mother’s miscarriage
Never had to realize after their mother almost died
Of a postpartum hemorrhage
After having their baby sister
That one day, mom will die
One day, we will all die
And this is the way of life
I spent high school raising a baby
After my father was finally deemed a danger to his family
And was no longer allowed to live with us
I moved seven hundred miles away
Into the arms of an abusive man-child
Who would be my mental captor for the next five years
I have torn free of my chrysalis
That transformed me through my years of anguish
And have emerged
Not a monarch like The Beautiful Girls my age
Instead, I have become archerontia atropis
The death moth
My appearance is soft and unassuming
But make no mistake
I am an omen
Cunning as they come
I am not to be fucked with
Resilient while bees attack as I steal their honey
You need only look at the skull etched on my likeness to see
I have a penchant for darkness
But a taste for the sweetness that life has to offer
And if I could return to that little girl
Staring in anguish at her reflection in the mirror
I would tell her that she is a different kind of beautiful
Because the beauty that comes from darkness
Is rarer than that born in light
