The diet

He tells me:

Why don't you eat well?

And I:

Just smile at him

I never knew how to eat well.

I knew how to eat soups for lunch and enter my stomach in the mirror.

I knew how to eat until I felt the vomit travelling to my lips.

I knew not to eat until the cigarette felt like oxygen starvation.

But I never knew how to eat without a challenge in mind.

He looks at me with concern in his eyes, a plate thrust on his fingers, a huff in his lungs as the excuses get shorter and shorter.

It is that I eat with my family as a famished knowing food for the first time as if I was  raised in war and abandoned on the road because sometimes the truth of my saying:

I'm fatter

With their reply:

Where?

I know it hurts me more than them and less to me than them, and the snake doesn't have much of a tail to bite in the madhouse of this equation.

They pass me the drink and they see my fingers adding the calories that my mind no longer has the strength to continue. 

They tell me about the bar but by miracles that cannot be explained I have money for poison but not for food. 

They tell me about balance in the rope of my danger but I wear long-sleeved shirts in summer to hide the cuts between the shame of the ribs that are visible in the fat.

And

I tell myself:

Why don't you go to the bathroom and finish the misery?

I answer:

Because that would be healthier than what I'm doing to myself.

Ta.