Brie Nicole Inked

I became fluent in subtraction. Skin from bone. Hunger from mouth. Self from self. Carving pieces away with invisible hands, convinced that emptiness was a language everyone else understood. The girls in magazines looked like sharpened things. Beautiful things. Hollowed and polished and held up to the light. So I pressed my palms against my own softness and imagined disappearance. Imagined applause. Imagined belonging arriving dressed as a smaller version of me.

The mirror developed teeth. Not enough. Not enough. Not enough. It fed on measurements and comparisons, on fluorescent dressing room confessions, on the ache beneath my ribs that felt almost holy. I mistook deprivation for devotion. Turned longing into a religion. Worshipped scales. Worshipped numbers. Worshipped the sacred promise that if I could become less, perhaps I would finally become worthy of more.

Around me, the world handed out blueprints for shrinking. Fold your stomach inward. Fold your appetite inward. Fold your voice inward. Become delicate enough to digest. Become beautiful enough to consume. So I swallowed myself in pieces. A skipped meal here. A swallowed cry there. A body becoming a ghost while everyone congratulated the vanishing act.

The hunger grew roots.

It threaded itself through every thought, every reflection, every bite balanced precariously on a fork. It lived beneath my tongue like static. A relentless hum. A gnawing. A vacancy wearing my face. Even full, I felt empty. Even thinner, I felt enormous. The goalposts drifted farther into the distance, shimmering mirages on a horizon stitched together by self-loathing and want.

And what a strange thing—to become haunted by the very body carrying you through the world.

To stare at your reflection as though it were a crime scene. To search for evidence of worth inside collarbones and hipbones and shrinking waistlines. To believe acceptance was hidden somewhere beneath the skin. Buried deep enough that all you had to do was excavate. Dig. Dig. Dig.

But beneath the rubble there was never perfection.

Only a girl gathering fragments of herself from the floor.

Only a pulse.

Only breath.

Only the terrible, tender realization that no amount of disappearing could make a person belong to themselves.

The void had never been in my body.

It was in the wound that taught me I needed to vanish to be loved.