After a Hard Winter

Before you were sick, you were ignorant. For all the words and sentences you had accumulated, your consciousness was blank; unmarked snow covering scarred earth below. Before you were sick, you were cocooned. Feathers covered your eyes and the ache in your belly was your friend. Beguiled like this, you crawled closer to the disorder with each skipped meal. 

Even when you knew you were sick, you were ignorant. You sat alone at lunchtime, consuming air quietly, watching a South Korean doctor explain starvation and vomiting. Watching entertainers swallow what you could not, enraptured by their breaking of your rules. Even when you knew, and your doctors knew, and your parents knew, you stayed and held the hand of hunger. 

Then when you were sick, it was chaos -- the once-placid snow whipping up savagely to blur your tormented psyche. You inundated your stomach with water, pressed your phone inside underclothes to please the hospital scale. You dumped milk down the sink and spit chicken into the trash. When you were sick, you were almost bald yet downy with lanugo. Inside your mind, rain kept pock-marking the icy ground, and you loathed yourself because you hated rain. 

But while you were sick, you were learning how to tolerate this rain. For as it drizzled, it melted the remaining snow, and you became not as ignorant. You faced your past with clarity and understood the lies you had erected, loathing it all less. With an uncovered, freed consciousness, you obtained hope: the hope to sow seeds of growth and see lovely things bloom again.