Beautiful

Maybe this is all love is and all it will ever be-- boys fucking girls and pretending it's love, girls getting fucked and pretending they like it, saying "I love you, too," and wanting to throw up.

And that's when it hits me, the punch in the stomach, the carving out of my insides. That's when I realize that none of this is a movie. I will not go out with a bang. There is no ending. There are no credits. I will wake up and I will keep waking up and this will always be waiting for me.

If you are still, no one can hurt you. If you play dead, there is nothing to kill.

It feels like the ground is breathing and the air has hands, like everything is moving except me, like I am the only thing solid, like it is the rest of the world that is dizzy.

There is a picture of me in their heads, a picture of someone I don't know yet. She is not the chubby girl with the braces and bad perm. She is not the girl hiding in the bathroom at recess. She is someone new, a blank slate they have named beautiful. That is what I am now: beautiful, with this new body and face and hair and clothes. Beautiful, with this erasing of history.

They are ghosts of people I never knew, which the rain will wash away.

I want to crush my cigarette on his eyelid. I would rather he keep fucking me for the rest of the night than lie here staring at me tracing my ribs with his fingertips, acting like what happened meant something.

He backs out the door batting those eyelashes I thought were so sexy when I first met him. Now I want to pluck them out one by one.

I feel the ghost of his fingers inside me.

And my name sounds like flowers in his mouth.

Maybe that's all love is-one person saying it because they think they're supposed to and the other person feeling to guilty to say anything else

People don't just let you change identities, not unless there's something in it for them.

I feel myself floating without the weight of him on my body.

Smoke is not chasing me and making my eyes sweat. My eyes are not burning. I am not crying. I am not standing behind my mother and she is not facing the wall and she is not saying, 'Smoke follows beauty.' Smoke follows beauty. Smoke follows beauty. Smoke follows beauty.

And what they're doing could be called kissing but it's more like sword fighting with tongues.

There is a whole other world with an entirely different version of me, a me that is not pretty, a me that no boys want, a me she would never talk to.

There are voices you can silence.

They said the doctors could tell from the scars." "Stop." "Scars can tell you how old the wound is." "Stop." "When I stopped going to school, they came and found me. They found me in the closet." "Sarah.

Your boyfriend smells bad, says Sarah as she sniffs the armpit of the giant sweatshirt. All boys smell bad I say and she nods her head like we have just figured out something very important.