From the earliest age, I was taught
that it’s best to make yourself as small as possible.

When I went out to restaurants
I knew how to make my meal as small as possible,
how to fill my plate
with emptiness,
by squishing the unwanted remainders in on itself
until it was the size I wanted.

There is a sick fixation we have on empty space.
We can never be small enough,
take up a small enough amount of room,
be made up of a large enough amount
of vacancy.

We judge beauty based on
how lightly someone’s body presses down a scale.
When someone’s cheeks turn from
full and blushing
to hollow gaunt shadows,
we applaud this kind of transformation,
like a slow motion implosion.

We praise the way legs grow
further apart,
the way arms hang
off away from our bodies,
the curve of a back that arches
away from the touch of another,
the space
between our chins and our necks.

Even trivial things that we wouldn’t think of:
how slender
our fingers are,
how skinny
a nose it,
the overall lack of self a person has.
There is a limit to
how much you can be, and
if you don’t abide by it,
people will wonder at you.
They’ll say you don’t care
about your looks.

All because
empty
is not how you would care to look.