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numbers game

i have never been very good at math.

so it's no surprise that i don't have much of an affinity towards numbers. but in the goulash of information that is thickening in my brain, suspect lumps rise to the surface, slithery and foreign.

i never weigh myself (except when sweaters become shifts, and pants drop to the bathroom floor without an unzip.)

if a certain number flickers in that telltale window, expectations are shot down faster than a gunslinger at high noon. our moods drop, unlike the weight we've gained, and we're tossed into the past, chained to the bad decisions we think we've made the day before.

peering at a lower number, we obsess over what we must perpetuate; jumping ahead into a time that may never come.

and all we really lose is celebrating in the body we have today...

i had that. and i lost it.

[all scales worldwide should be certified as triggers of emotional dysfunction and then disposed of in an entirely green manner]

dr. dauer does not call himself a numbers man. and thank god.

the unpredictability of my creatinine was as untethered as kim kardashian's wedding finger, never conveniently climbing upwards like a spiking fever, as per textbook. they were numbers that didn't make "sense". sick, but not sick enough. soon enough it all blurred into nonsense for me...a haze of hell...

"addicts often emege from childhoods of profound trauma and then rigid, regimented upbringings that manifest in OCD/control issues..."

[you don't say...]

there was a little red haired girl whose daddy had just died. and she had a candy floss pink room with a canopy bed. but she couldn't focus on studying, until her room was perfectly neat, orderly, controlled. "don't look down, you'll see a hair. don't look over, that book's not centered. and whatever you do, don't start counting."

[ding, ding, ding....]

round and round she goes. where she'll stop, nobody knows...

shackled and bound to a russian roulette circle game, she's savagely spun until her mind and spirit are churned into a delicate froth and she can't spot any more. all she wants to do is run, but she's been nailed with slicing accuracy. the bindings will come off, and there won't be any excuses anymore.

sniping the grand prize for the most dysfunctional childhood, she stupors into the past, tripping, and falling, desperately grasping at weeds that will never grow; instead of looking around and inhaling the fortuitous forest in which she actually stands.

don't count the memories that could have been, don't count the pills you took, the pills you had left, the pills you wanted, counting, always counting...

but then she counted on lists. and lists of lists.

lists of every penny she'd spent. music countdown lists, lists of what she wore to school, lists of what she had done, what she had half done, what she wanted to do, what she couldn't do, what she wouldn't do...

and they were numbered and organized, but she never felt truly in control.

because she never really was. and she never really will be. except for today.

creatinine 0.8

19 days sober

ran 3.76 miles

just hen.

just for today. Posted by Henriette Ivanans at 10:43 PM