Girl in Pieces

Everyone has that moment I think, the moment when something so momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there.

That's how hearts get broken, you know. When you believe in promises.

I remember the stars that night. They were like salt against the sky, like someone spilled the shaker against very dark cloth. That mattered to me, their accidental beauty.

+"I think u are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when u don’t know how to be.

I'm tired and angry at me. For letting myself get smaller and smaller in the hopes that he would notice me more. But how can someone notice you if you keep getting smaller?

She's not a cookie, or a book, or a record on a shelf. You can't just play with her and then put her back.

You can't break my heart, she cries, breathy and furious. You can't own my soul. What I have, I made, what I have is mine. What I have I made, what I have is mine.

I just want to feel better. My own body is my deepest enemy. It wants, it wants, it wants and when it does not get, it cries and cries and I punish it. How can you live in fear of your own body?

Don't let the cereal eat you. It's only a fucking box of cereal, but it will eat you alive if you let it.

...when I look at my arms, I don't think revolutionary. I think sad, and pain, but not revolutionary.

Everything and everybody that's busted can be fixed. That's what I think.

Each aberration of my skin is a song. Press your mouth against me. You will hear so much singing.

Girl listens to radio. Girl finds music. Girl has whole other world. Girl slips on headphones. World gone.

Everyone has that moment, I think, the moment when something so...momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there.

People aren't nice, people aren't nice, you should know that by now.

I'm no stranger to fucking up.

Dear Ellis, I have something really fucking angelic to tell you.

I don't feel sad. For just now, I don't feel scared. I feel, for right now, well, kind of triumphant.

Everyone here seems to know exactly what they need, but I leave without a thing.

I think you are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when you don't know how to be. If that makes any sense?

Keep your shit together and stay strong, he whispers in my ear.

Mickey holds up the soggy paper. DIE. Don't you die.

That's what was in my head in the attic when I took broken glass from my tender kit and began to cut myself into tiny pieces.

I blink at myself. I could be a girl, a real girl. I could be a possibility, with Mikey. Couldn't I?

I room with Louisa. Louisa is older and her hair is like a red-and-gold noisy ocean down her back. There's so much of it, she can't even keep it in with braids or buns or scrunchies. Her hair smells like strawberries; she smells better than any girl I've ever known. I could breathe her in forever. My first night here, when she lifted her blouse to change for bed, in the moment before that crazy hair fell over her body like a protective cape, I saw them, all of them, and I sucked my breath in hard. She said, "Don't be scared, little one." I wasn't scared. I'd just never seen a girl with skin like mine.

I'm so unwhole. I don't know where all the pieces of me are, how to fit them together, how to make them stick. Or if I even can.

After he died, my mother was like a crab: she tucked everything inside and left only her shell.