Unforgivable

Unforgivable.
It’s been stuck in my head like a song,
like dye in my brain tissue.
I didn’t think it to be poetic,
it was not a conscious attempt 
to feel sorry for myself.
It was just a thought that I had one day.

Please let me be beautiful after so many years of being
so
unforgivably
ugly.

It passed in and out
without effort and without angst
as though it were normal.
commonplace.
true.

What is it to be unforgivably ugly?
I think it’s like a weight upon the soul that’s
always there
weighing you down
curving your spine and shoulders forward in a 
don’t-look-at-me slouch.

I think it’s like a tiny snake that
coils in the brain
whispering directly into the ear canal
its voice honest and its words
mocking and cruel.

I think it is like a little girl who’s
happy and
bold and
strong
who sits silently by herself for years
ruminating on the scorn she’s picked up and
collected
in the heavy ring of fat around her hips.

I think it’s the death of her 
and the birth of a new girl,
a girl who sits straight to keep her mind 
off of the flesh that pulls her forward
who apologizes in her head
in her eyes
when she touches someone else
an apology that makes
no sense
unless you see her and accept her theorem that
she is a contaminant and
you are
everything
she cannot be.

Unforgiveable.
A stain in the brain tissue,
a mutation of DNA,
a design in ink jabbed beneath the skin. 

To be unforgivable is to be
lost and
changed,
to be, with one action,
cast out of the story into the
white
that surrounds the words,
to be changed from a person into a person who 
stands looking at herself
thinking logically about how she wishes she were
someone she could
love.