I have learned to hate myself in fragments. I hate my lack of emotional stability on Sunday, on Monday it’s my stubbornness. Vain attempts at cross-stitching my lips and morals together so I cannot ruin this heart for myself. My faith, only as steady as my hand, pricking my thumb until I am accustomed to the pain. Until I cannot distinguish my conviction from my fear. Tuesday I untangle the thread from my lipstick and try to teach myself patience, shove it down my throat like it will dissolve into my tongue and wander into my bloodstream. On Wednesday I don’t feel it traveling through my veins, and of course, because I am still impatient, I turn doe-eyed, deer in the headlights, mangled by skidding tires until I am just flesh and bone. What an awful image I must be through a cracked windshield. I try to heal this skin like a snake molts its scales. But I worry that my exoskeleton is turning into something I’m not. Wednesday night, I watch injured animals through a rearview mirror, call it self-preservation instead of a cruel obsession. I dream of valiant notions of self-sacrifice until I am more martyr than human. Thursday I throw up layers of myself into the toilet, and it smells like my disappointment. I bite my tongue as if it will cage my anger behind my teeth, like the metallic taste of blood will serve as a substitute for the words that should be leaving my mouth right now. Tell me what’s wrong. But I never know. Instead, I bite my lips and swallow the skin inside my mouth like I swallow my resentment. And I swallow my resentment how I swallow my vitamins, a gritty pill chugged with half-empty cups of water. Catches in my throat and makes it that little bit harder to breathe, but I mean, how am I impatient and iron deficient? I drink chocolate milk and insecurity for breakfast on Friday. I look everywhere but the mirror, meet everyone’s gaze but my own. But never for too long because if you look at me enough you’ll start to see me how I see myself.  I feel like the monster under my bed, perpetually sentenced to the grimy compliance of hiding in plain sight. I sew my confidence onto my body, but it is stitched with the same thread used in the pocket of my jeans. And by that I mean, pocket-sized self-love, crumpled  and forgotten like any old receipt,  shoved into any dark place where I am not forced to carry it. When I catch my reflection in windows I do not linger. I am always leaving, hiding, running away. And it is an exhausting sport; feeling like you are being chased when there is nobody behind you. Saturday night I come home at midnight breathless. I think I am happy, but I fall asleep on bedsheets of disdain and pillows of shame. I can hear voices in the walls asking, relentless: Tell me what’s wrong. But I don’t know. I never do.