Do You Want My Body or a Stone? | Caitie Young

i am tired of eating mortar. my body is getting too heavy. when the girl at the ice cream shop doesn’t take my order, i joke if it’s because i’m chubby and the man behind us laughed and she made up for it later, but anyway it’s winter now, and i can’t forget the dead kitten i found encased in snow when i was fourteen and writing novels in notebooks, one of which i was looking for that day. there are so many things i’m tired of holding, like my mothers hand after she orders the doctor to put me on xanax because i cried on my birthday and even the alive cat and cake couldn’t make it better. she used to take four a day because the doctor said they were taken as needed, and mom said three kids is overdose enough. she still can’t call it addiction maybe because it didn’t involve needles or plucking or ivory under her tongue; how many times did E try to take herself away? M doesn’t want to start HRT because he doesn’t want to deal with all of that hair and the internet says your clitoris will turn purple and grow to the size of your thumb or bigger. E always said beauty was pain, and so is the price of seeing your true self manipulated in a silver elevator door or in melted snow water or in the bathtub. before i go, i want to tell you about the yellow exit sign with two arrows: it means there are multiple ways to leave, and when i did, i saw the ivy clinging to the brick side of the building and there were so many scars hidden under the ivy and it looked like E’s arm but when we asked her what happened she said she scraped it crawling through old man mountain which is not actually a mountain but a cave, and the marks were so red then; i don’t know what to do with that, but i know for certain the ivy was so green and dark and alive i could almost hear it breathing. i didn’t have the heart to tell them about winter, but something, maybe god, tells me they can feel it coming too.