Questions For Sad Girls

Trigger warnings: suicidal thoughts, self harm, eating disorders, sexual abuse, abuse

Can you keep a secret?

I've known since I was six and saw that body on the train tracks that I would die by suicide.  He had jumped in front of the oncoming subway car and smeared across the tracks.  My mother screamed and tried to cover my eyes and for the first time in my life I realized that some people get to decide when they die and I wanted to be one of them.

Can you keep a secret?

I spit my food down my sleeve like my elbows were made of hungry baby birds.  The food cant hurt me if I don’t swallow.  The food will not bloat me if it never reaches the inside of me.  

Can you keep a secret?

Little mouths on my wrists blow kisses to the razor blade.  They pucker in the metal’s reflection.  There is electricity when pain is created.  I could power a city block with the energy coming off my blade.

Can you keep a secret?

I am not a real person, just threads of thought greased with fat.  Everything melts away so easily and im nothing.  I would cook down to bone and no substance, all flesh sloughed off in the heat of the cooking pot.  Im too oily to be appealing to a cannibal.

Can you keep a secret?

A boy on the school bus touched my chest and I cried because I thought he was teasing me for being fat.  I didn’t tell anybody, just in case I was right and the grown-ups laughed, too.  I didn’t realize until I was grown enough to wonder why, if hey were making fun of my fat, they never touched my belly.

Can you keep a secret?

Ashley shows up to school with fingerprint bruises down her arms.  She says that she woke up with them.  She says she dreamed about her dead mother every time they appear.  Her father is a cop.  She comes to school with blackened eyes under a dried shell of flaking concealer, painting the right skin back on.  When she cries, it all runs down her face and the bruises show up in the clean spots.

Can you keep a secret?

They kept my best friend in an attic one summer and took her phone so all that she could do was write in a notebook.  She wrote about killing me.  I wish sometimes that she had.

Can you keep a secret?

Ive hidden jars of vomit in my bedroom after learning the technique from a health class movie about eating disorders.

Can you keep a secret?

I didn’t eat yesterday, and I'm not gonna eat today, and I'm not gonna eat tomorrow!

Can you keep a secret?

I thought the older boys were only tickling me.  I didn’t know you had to be in love to let a man touch you below the belly button.  I played with all the older boys in the neighborhood as a little girl.  They did these things and, in exchange, they made my bike sound like a motorcycle with a playing card in the spokes.  

Can you keep a secret?

All the boys are girls now, it must have been something in the water, the kind of thing that turns the frogs gay.  I cringe at the sound of my birth name.  The girls don’t want to be girls anymore because being a girl is pain is beauty.  I think, if I only got strong enough, it would protrude from between my legs.

Can you keep a secret?

I am a boy in my heart but a girl if anybody asks me.  I’ve got boy parts: my head and my heart and my misplaced sex.  I beg, “Unsex me here, demons!” I want to destroy anything about me that is defined and become completely amorphous. 

Can you keep a secret?

I am growing tired of this body.  It is cumbersome and heavy.  It is not my body, just the body that I am inside of.  I feel no allegiance to this rotten flesh.

Can you keep a secret?

I knew my name once, but now I am only referred to in sideways glances and double entendres.

Can you keep a secret?

We were up all night sawing at the necks of our high school rapists with the rustiest, dullest blades we could find.  When they begged “No!” we were as deaf to their protests as they were to ours.  We castrated them and put the severed appendages in their mouths to stop their degrading words. 

Can you keep a secret?

Sometimes, when the sun is setting and the neon pink bathes the power lines the entire woods looks like the strip joint you used to dance at down south.  You say it was anything but glamorous but can’t deny that the lights sure were bright.

Can you keep a secret?

I want somebody to stick a knife into my brain until I can no longer say The Lord’s Prayer or sing God Bless America.

Can you keep a secret?

I passed out in a snowbank and my imaginary friend traded her life for mine.  She went with the devil, because God doesn’t make those kinds of deals.  Sometimes I still dream about her in the hellfire where I belong.  That was my second overdose.

Can you keep a secret?

Mom and Dad don’t love each other anymore.  Mom sleeps on the sofa and scowls across the dinner table.  Dad shouts until it is cold and congealed.  The picture of the perfect American family. 

Can you keep a secret?

The last time I overdosed, I woke up with both of my front teeth busted out like a five year old.  I could only eat soft food for over a month. They put everything back into place with wires and refused me painkillers.  I was so angry that I almost ripped the wire out right there in the office and said thanks for nothing.  I threw the Ibuprofen in the trash and called my cousin for Vicodin.