I remembered an event today that had been burried deep within. I loved swimming, I still do. We lived by the beach so we often went there during weekends or holidays. The day I remembered was a summer day, I was 13 years old. Both of my caretakers looked at me in my swimming suit and frowned. They were upset at the shape and size of my body, they said that theirs "did not have an ounce of fat" at my age. I felt terribly sad back then. Now I am furious. How dare they blame me and assign moral judgment for the shape of the body I was born into? How dare they look down at one type of body just because theirs was different? It is not their fault though. Humans can be so despicable. I was a child, growing into an adult body slowly and I was told I should only grow vertically but I had no control over how my body would grow.

Since age 10 or 11 I started to try to grow vertically only. So I stopped eating or I would get rid of food after consuming it. At the end this did not stop my horizontal growing much but it did completely stunt vertical growth.

Now I am an adult. I learned to love swimming again. I am as small as I was back then at 13. I couldn't grow at all. It's not their fault nor mine. But it really is quite painful that I was blamed for things I could never control and that I hurt myself in futile attempts to change these things.

I remember one night when a beautiful friend of mine and I were smoking cigarettes by the window of my apartment. "I fit in more into society's idea of beauty than you do. I have normative beauty -- I'm normative." She said. We were having a serious conversation about this whole thing. "Normative", that word left a metallic taste in my mouth. I heard it over and over in her voice inside my head. Normative, she said. She is normative. I am not.

And perhaps she was right: I have golden brown skin, I am loud, opinionated and short. My shape resembles more that of Botticelli's Venus than that of this generation's muses. I have eyes as dark as night and hair to match it. I like to wear loose clothing, I bind my breasts, I cut my hair short and have jewelry on places other than my earlobes.

She, in contrast, has skin as pale as ivory, large green eyes, she is tall and has long legs. She is that of which poets write about in the 21st century. She is thin (almost "too thin", people say. Her thinness makes people worry which is funny since she has never starved herself while I, being larger, starved myself until a month ago), she has long blonde hair as soft as silk, she wears dresses and short skirts and shirts cut just an inch below her breasts that are small and perky, she laughs at men's jokes and stares at them in awe, she is confident in her sexuality and isn't desperate for love.

Yes, putting it that way, she was right, she fits in perfectly inside the Iron Maiden and her knives have yet to stab her as they've stabbed me for years. She is lucky. But at that moment, I did not think of her comment that way. I did not see that she was simply admitting her privilege in this unfair world. I felt terrible, I knew she was right, but instead of having compassion for myself, I thought "You're right... You deserve to live... You deserve to be loved... I don't".

God, I have grown and learned a lot since you sent me to this world, but I still find it so hard to let go of the false belief that beauty has but one definition in the eyes of everyone else and that to possess that beauty means to be loved. What does it matter if I think my body is beautiful and my face lovable if nobody else will think so? Will I be loved if I am not like my friend? I have grown tired of the pain and the famine. But, God, I am still so afraid of being unloved.

Do you think she hates me

Does she think I am ugly?

Does she think I am unlovable?

Does she hate me

she's said before that she doesn't believe i am ugly. she's said she thinks i am attractive. i don't believe her. i dont look like any of the people she finds attractive. doesshe think i am beautiful? she said so before. i dont believer. why do i want her to love me.

I am a fool for love stories. I like very few of them but the ones I do I hold close to my heart forever.

I like the tragic ones, the ones where the lovers are forced to be apart. Perhaps that is why I hold on so strongly to the love I've felt in the past that was not returned. Nobody wants to hear a story about love that just couldn't be because the lovers took different paths and agreed to be friends rather than partners. But a story about a boy who loved another, his dearest friend, for years and years -- seeing him kiss maiden after maiden who broke his heart into pieces, having to dry his friend's tears while never being able to confess his true feelings? Now, that's quite a story.

I often say I want to be loved but maybe what I want is just a good story to tell. I want things to happen to me so I may write or talk about them. I want tragic, senseless, passionate love that leaves me broken and lost. Is that odd?

I am in so much pain. I rip out chunks of skin from my arm, my chest and my face. I hit my head against the wall. Over and over and over. I pulled my hair. I burned my thighs with cigarettes.

I am in pain. I want to disappear. I want to die.

I cannot do this anymore. I am afraid of the sun. I do not want to open my eyes. The pain is unbearable.

I feel so utterly unlovable. My whole life I have felt so disfigured, so deformed and utterly disgusting. I have always felt like I am not human enough. I feel like I am some sort of strange creature. I am miserably human but monstrously hideous. I look at myself and I try to find comfort in my existence but I know I do not look as what people desire. The size of my body is in every way wrong. I have too many flaws on my outer shell that are not erased by what lies beneath.

I am unlovable. I am rude, I am bitter, I am angry and aggressive and strange. I am too masculine yet not masculine enough. I am disgusting. I am so wrong. Everything about me is wrong.

I do not truly wish I looked like beautiful women do but I can't help but think that if that was what I was I would be loved. I wish I was slim and tall, delicate and young with nothing hanging from me. In my deepest of consciousness I wish I was more of a man. I wish I was born in such a way that I was raised as a boy from birth to adulthood and never had to worry about beauty and I could just be loved for everything else. I can't help but think I'd be less bitter if I was taken as a man -- If I could love as a man and never be questioned. If I was tall and my voice was deep and my hands big and I had all the bits people require of a man... If I was that... Would she love me? Would she like me? Or rather. If I was that... would I even be afraid of love? Would I be afraid of intimacy and nakedness? I would feel... free. Then why do I find myself longing for a shape that would keep me in shackles but would be "pretty"? I don't know. Sometimes I feel like giving up on it all. I don't-- or rather can't love as a woman and nobody will love me as either woman or man. I am... wrong. Everything about me is wrong. I am wrong.

There's a force field around me. Or perhaps, it is a shell. A hard shell. There is a hard shell around my body but what lays inside it is soft, vulnerable and fragile. Inside the shell there is a young man, with wounds that are wide opened and bleeding. The shell is hard, it is cold. The boy feels the cold shell around him. The wounds do not stop bleeding.

I am not here, what you see is but a mask, a costume, a fully fledged character in a play. He shows you only what you want to see. The boy isn't here with you, he's up there on a small asteroid. He owns nothing but a rose that he tends to everyday. He cannot go down there to replace his puppet. If he goes the rose will miss him. She will die without him. He must stay up here, in the distance, looking down at his puppet play the role of a lifetime.

Everyone I've ever met has treated me like their personal plaything. Every kind smile hid cruel intentions. "I'll be your father, I'll be your brother, I'll be your mother, I'll be your sister." That's what they all said. I had a mother, but she was no mother. I had a father but he lived in a small asteroid with nothing but a rose he tended to, I was left with his puppet. I accepted those fathers, those mothers, sisters and brothers. I trusted them. They showed me new things, they caressed my thighs, they kissed my lips while I refused. They saw me as an object, a fun little thing to play with, to corrupt and to break. What was it about me? Was I too beautiful? Or just too convenient? Was I too innocent? Too naive? The first boy I kissed out of will told me: "What I like most about you is how innocent you are." My innocense was attractive to him but it had long been gone. Pornography, inappropiate touches and anecdotes of sexual conquest had already broken me, turned me into the perfect little sex doll. I am a little sex doll, pure and untouched but not really. I've become an object. Perhaps, the puppet does not belong to the boy.

Today marks the 49th day of Quarentine. I've been locked in inside my home for 49 days straight. It feels odd. I think about the past constantly. I think of my friends, the ones I left behind as I moved around the globe. I think of lost love, I think of missed opportunites. I don't know what's going on anymore. Time has no meaning to me.

My body feels so wrong. It feels as if I've been living in someone else's home but I cannot go back to my own home because it does not exist. I am homeless in my own form.