Ana

    You are never skinny enough. That's impossible. Always fat. Fat, fat, fat. The mirror tells you so, every time you look into its cold reflective surface. Your thighs, they're sausages. Where's the gap? You can't be pretty without the gap between your thighs. And what about those flabby arms? If you want guys to like you, you need dainty wrists. You need to look like they could break you if they hold on too tightly. The name of the game is to be delicate, like a glass feather. A flat stomach would be a dream come true. You want to see your ribs, see your spine. No fat on this body, please. 
    You stop eating breakfast. It's not that hard, since you don't usually have time for it in the morning, anyways. Then, you start skipping lunch, too. You count the calories obsessively. You can't gain weight. You can't be fat. Pretty soon, it's only a hundred calories a day. It's getting hard to stand up. The world is always spinning. But that's okay. You're dropping pounds like hot coals. You're 120 pounds, 110, 100, 90 pounds. 
    They start to notice. Your mom and dad. Your friends. They look at your new body with a mix of worry and admiration. The other girls can see the space between your thighs, the bagginess of your t-shirts. They study the bones that are now clearly visible under sallow skin, the bones that you are so proud of. 
    You survive on water and air alone. You breathe in the thin, you don't need food. What nourishes you is the way your fingers can fit all the way around the top of your thigh, the way your rib cage sticks out when you like down. You can wear the over-sized sweaters and not look like an elephant. You wear skinny jeans, and they're actually skinny. 
    You believe that you are beautiful. 
    Until the day you pass out while on your daily jog, and you had not eaten anything that morning. Your stomach was so hollow, it was a wonder that it hadn't turned to ice and shattered already. Your neighbor found you on the sidewalk, your arms like the twigs on their lawn. She called 911, and the siren screeched onto your street, red and blue. Your mom came running, your dad left work early. They wept as the paramedics loaded your glass body into the ambulance. 
    They met you at the hospital. 
    But you didn't meet them. 
    You were so underweight. So light. So thin. You thought you were beautiful that way, but now...You were dead. They said you did it to yourself. It was a form of suicide. In way, they were right. But how could you have done it? It couldn't have been you, because pain is something inflicted upon you by others, not yourself.
   You were buried in white. You were a skeleton. You had died long before your heart stopped beating. 
    Are there mirrors in heaven?