(As if you can fend off cancer with berries and Pilates.
As if eating salad and walking twenty minutes a day will somehow prevent the horrible gasping death that comes at the end of hellish "treatment"...but I digress...)
I’m never going to be delicate like them
Short and slight
The best I can hope for
Is a less chunky kind of tall
I’m never going to be free of hair
Or moles, or birthmarks, or varicose veins
My teeth will never be white
Even if I brush and brush
Until I brush them away
And my feet will never be soft or kissable
They have the hard skin of climbing rocks as a child and
wearing boots as the rebellious teen, summer heat be damned
There are so many things I will never be
And so many people who will never approve
I look at the thin girls, the gorgeous girls
The perfect skin girls, the white teeth girls
And the girls with kissable feet
I see them smile, so happy in their digital world.
But then I meet them on the streets of the world I live in…
And they say the same things I say here.
Because no one has it all at once.
And even when they do it isn't enough.
There is always one more pound to lose, one more sun spot to laser away, one more shade of white brighter, one more stray hair to pluck, one more cream to smear in some place that god never intended cream to go.
The immortals on the magazine pages and the billboards and the
flashing ads that run down the sides of the browser window are pieced together
from dozens of models on an LCD screen.
Out here in the less digital world we are only one person
each and no flower which has lived in the wild gardens of the real comes
away with every petal and every leaf intact.
Unless it lives a life under glass and then, when time is
cruel as time tends to be, under knife.
I know the truth now, after years of worrying and crying
over a reflection that has never been and never will be “wrong” any more than
any other reflection anywhere else: I
will never be healthy enough for the doctors; I will never be beautiful enough
for the critics.
I will never groom and eat and drink and sleep and move to
their exact specifications because I am not a computer model—not a picture, not
an average, not a statistic—I am alive and living is messy business for those
who commit to it.
