perfect//imperfect

There’s a girl in my grade who cut herself last week. Deep gashes the color of berries that stain your lips on days when you shouldn’t be eating the raspberry sorbet in the freezer & the scissors lay open on the counter & god I thought she was actually happy. Look at her in the hallways thinking she’s so pretty she’s so skinny she doesn’t have any problems and I come to school and there’s bandages up and down her forearms and swollen rims around her eyes and at least three girls crying in the bathroom. And suddenly I’m halfway down the hallway and seeing afterimages I can’t quite make out. Is this what it means to be perfect?

One of my friends wants to k*ll themselves. There are raised pink lines where they dragged an earring across their arms in the middle of the night wishing desperately to scream. I watch their face as if I am pretending to worship; I know that to everyone else the fizzing Coke in their hands and the easy laugh on their lips mean fine but at recess the picnic table beneath us shudders with the weight of their words. And we step back inside and everything is suddenly fine it’s fine says the space behind their eyes. Hollowed & dreaming of haunted forests where the rain never ever ends. Is this what it means to want to be perfect?

I look at everyone through a gauzy lens now as if they all have secrets. Of course they do. How could you not – when people are crying watermelon seed tears in the hallways and whispering things they think they know into the half-eaten bags of Takis we eat to numb reality with blue spice? When I watch my best friends count calories & dig their nails into the soft skin of their abdomen, sobbing not good enough into my shoulder as I hold them through another panic attack because my hands are the only ones that don’t tremble? When I want to smash the girls’ bathroom mirrors with my fist and let the blood drip down the pink tiled drain and paint STAY across the lockers in big shaky letters because no one should want to hurt themselves?

But they do. And I don’t know why and I can’t stop it and all I can do is move my lips and hope somebody hears the scream. Is this what it means when people say nobody's perfect?