I find a mirror. A six by six piece of glass tainted with time, hanging on a bathroom wall in the back alley of a little shop two streets away from the local bar. It doesn't matter that there are people outside drunk with summer's first day, screaming and dancing the weight off their backs. I strip myself bare anyway.

This is me. Flesh and bone but not as much bone as I want there to be, and too much flesh. Flesh everywhere. My fingers trace the hour glass I am not, and falter around my waist. They grip the extra inches- enough to sift into and out of both my palms, and of their own accord, they squeeze. Hoping with some twisted strand of desperation that it would disappear into nothings beneath my grasp.

My mother once told me that I have eyes like kaleidoscopes. That they were the most beautiful anything she had ever seen on anyone. She told me that my smile spilled across my face like a lifeline. But every time I find a mirror, and I believe that it can tell me who I am, my eyes only travel to who I'm not. To those places on my body I want to erase, those traces of a bad night and too much ice-cream.

It's silly to some. It's materialistic. But I sift through my closet and pass up every shirt that will form my silhouette. I walk around in bags and balloons hoping that maybe I can become the ghost I look like. My fingers constantly pulling the cloth away from my skin, striving to ensure that nothing gives me away. I am hiding in my own body. I am hiding that it exists. And I look in the mirror, pull my own eyes up to meet my gaze, and try to say the word. Three letters, one syllable, too much to hold. The only f word that really gets to me, besides the one that rhymes with hag.

I stand there in front of the six by six piece of glass, trying not to shield my eyes from the ones looking back. My fingers clench together in fists as the image of myself ingrains itself in my head. (No one could ever love me.)

So I throw myself at the mirror, shattering the glass. I drag the broken shards across my arms, creating rivers of crimson regret flowing out of my flesh thinking that perhaps if they flow long enough, they can suck all the ugly out of my body. Perhaps they can erase all my scars. Perhaps they can reduce me down to an acceptable size. Perhaps if they cause me enough pain, I can wither away and put an end to my pathetic existence.

As I watch these crimson rivers flow out of my flesh, I pick up the shattered tainted pieces of myself and position them back into a six by six formation, hoping that maybe someday, I'll be able to look at a mirror (without throwing myself at it), and say the word I need to say.