I Feel Like A Fool

By Georgia Bowan

I feel like a fool all the time and I want to cry.

I am too big for my body and too sick for my brain. How do I explain it to someone who doesn't exist inside my skin? To someone who has never known the cause? It's like this blunt and vibrant aching sensation that starts in my swollen trachea and ends in my knotted stomach.

Like being thirteen and walking home from school at lunchtime because someone made you feel insufferable and undesirable on the playground. Like your father telling you that you should have a figure, cleaner and more like your sister’s. Like the boy, the first that you loved, telling you he wished you would be killed and raped.

Like mould setting in and infecting the flesh.

I’m well aware I could cut it off, I know I should. But every time I try to, I start to feel the urge again. I’m spilling with the feeling until it squeezes out the corners of my eyes and trickles out my nostrils. Now I am blubbering like a small child who didn’t get what they wanted. I feel pathetic and this aching is for you.

This is how it makes me feel.