Nostalgia of Love Left (or The Right to Sadness)

I don’t have the right to write about sadness,
not any more.
How can I sit and make words that
turn starvation and suffering into sense in my head
when my head is so shallow now,
so full of hair straighteners and
nail polish. I feel like the wrong end of a
shadow person, the wholesome girl that
turned into sickness, back from the dead.

I wonder if I’m lying to myself, sometimes,
I don’t think I was ever all that wholesome.
I wove lies into myself every day since I lost her;
it makes me crazy that she still sits in my
poetry when I know I am not in hers. But
I was burning red on my skin 11 years old,
scars gone to nothing now,
the remembrance of her and her flesh-breaking like
an echo in my head right through to last year,
though I hardly remember now
because remembrance takes calories.

I breathe easier these days, flesh obscuring my
hip bones, though my forearms still look like
those of a person unwell.
I have pulled myself out of the spinning into
nothingness, and I have done it alone because
to save dead weight is meaningless.
I am interminably putting off a diet,
(limitless days are like Sundays, like I haven’t had for years)
because that would mean
insanity, even though I checked in today at
123.6.