I’m not so much like a bird. Birds are cute. Birds are skinny. Birds are graceful. They’re beautiful, really. A bird would never have done any of the things that I’ve done.
No. I was more like a bulldozer. It was no house that I was ruining. At least, not a physical house. Sure, a house had support, and a frame, and it kept you alive. Though, your life kept you alive, too. You have support in your life. You’ve got a frame made up of your moral values and life lessons that you’ve picked up. Stacked up. You built your own house.
But no, I was a bulldozer set out to destroy my own life.
Or maybe I was trying to fix it. Maybe the only way to fix it was to completely destroy it and start over.
Birds didn’t try to destroy themselves. Well, at least they didn’t symbolically. No, not even angels shot out of the sky were on paths to destruction. Not even crows. Not even vultures. At least not self destruction.
Bulldozers destroyed houses. And when you were controlling your own bulldozer, you were destroying your own house (hopefully you weren’t destroying other’s houses).
I had tried that once. To destroy it. To ruin my life. To wreck it beyond repair. To eliminate it.
It had not ended well.
Really, it had ended with me in the hospital, swearing that what happened was purely accident. It ended with me in a neck brace. It ended in a few moments of death that had turned my bulldozer in the other direction.
The few moments when my heart wasn’t beating. I had died once. Not every fifteen year old could say that they’ve died before.
Well, I couldn’t even say that. I was too ashamed to. I couldn’t bear what I had done. It had brought me back.
They say that when you’re in the face of death, and it’s too late to come back, you start to have second thoughts. They say that you start to regret it, but by that time it’s too late.
Though, I was given a second chance.
They dropped me off in the ruins of my house. My life. It had it’s frame. But what was a moral frame made up of when you had values like mine?
My house was ugly.
Just like myself.
I was too large. Too quiet. I was the girl who sat in the back of the classroom, too scared to raise her hand because she feared that she’d say something awkward. I was the girl who sat and watched others conversations quietly from afar, never daring to add my own comment on the subject.
Who did I blame?
Myself.
It was my fault I had let my life get the way it was. It was my fault I had ended up in the hospital.
It was my fault for everything.
But really, what American with a little fat on them couldn’t feel bad about themselves? What human being couldn’t feel at least a little bad?
In this state? Really?
In the state where girls needed laxatives to make themselves feel skinny? In the state where ‘sexy’ was a shit pile of bones and implanted tits? Where greasy food was so cheap, and everything healthy cost so much?
What person could feel good about themselves when society demanded so much perfection?
You watch television, and everyone is ripped and thin. Every girl looks like she needs metal supports under her skin just to make sure her bones can support her silicon implants. Every guy looks like he’s chiseled out of rock.
