Four a.m. knows all my secrets

About how uncomfortable it is for the curves of my hips
And the flesh of my stomach to protrude
So assumingly, spreading across the expanse of my bed
Slowly and then all at once.

I never knew the day I shoved fingers down my throat-
Faking sick
To avoid my presentation for ninth grade English -
Would be the day I realized
I wanted to unzip my skin and dissolve into the earth.

Maybe shy girls are the sickest.

Under the eerie glowing streetlights
The pulsating stillness of November twilight listens
And I speak.

On how the heaviness of the dread of being normal
Weighs like an anchor. Not grounding me
But dragging me under.

How startling a notion it is to realize
That you twinkle like a star.
Beautiful, perhaps.
But replaceable. Predictable. One of many.

Or that the fog in my chest has been expanding since
I was eight years old.
It grows bigger and greyer
As I become smaller and paler.
I worry that I will become so foggy
That I will soon walk through life drunk and incoherent.
I worry that I will not care.

And I reveal that I try on many faces-
Dye my hair and change my name
Because I decided that I no longer wish to know myself.
I flip through hastily scrawled etchings in notebook after notebook-
Tearing out pages and molding a new girl from the jagged remains.

Six a.m. and my secrets are sealed
The sun brings with it erasure.
I am blissful.
I am stupid.
I am free.