Written After Yet Another Magazine Boasting "20 Ways to Slim for Summer" and Half A Dozen Mini-Articles Blaming Cancer Victims for Being Those People With "Poor Lifestyle and Habits"

(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.