the prison of bars so beautiful by Sadhika Raj (17, India)

​[Content warning: eating disorders]

​    Her waist was as thin as she could get it to be, yet it didn’t even hold a candle to the models plastered over every app she opened on her phone. The games she played downloaded on her device from when she was a blubbering twelve-year-old constantly flashed with advertisements that made her clutch the sagging expanse on her arm. The measly pores on her skin seemed to strike the heaviest punch to her already shriveling ego every time she managed to turn the camera to herself, a tiny yet hopeful part of her believing that she looked enough. The vertex of her perception of herself was enough. It was never the leaden words like pretty, gorgeous, or beautiful. Enough was what she hoped she would be one day. Just enough. 

​    She never had enough time to mull over what enough was. Enough to average more than a handful of likes on her Instagram post? Enough to receive an ounce of curiosity from the only be she believed she’d ever love? Enough to wear a skintight dress to a family gathering without having every statement directed at her have a hint of snarkiness over her choice of clothing or her, in general. Some nights, though, when she was cocooned in the warmth of her soft, fluffy blanket, she wondered what the salience of being pretty was. The urgency, the alarm to look her best, had devoured her piece by piece ever since she’d learned the rush of being complimented. At the end of the day, though, she knew she didn’t lack beauty—a subjective and ever-changing idea—in her eyes, but in the eyes of nearly every person gifted with a set of eyes. On the surface of her skin, she adored the girls, who seemed to have every facet of their outward nature carved by God, but the hatred she harbored was deep within the confines of her body. The hatred was in the legs that were struggling to keep up without being supplied with the proper nutrients, in the joints that felt like they were decaying decades before their expiration date, and in the mind that worked overtime to calculate calories and compile exercises. 
    She was trapped in the proverbial prison that didn’t allow her to see the light glistening, burning, and aching just for her at the end of the tunnel. The light desperately wanted its words to flow to her mind and set the fanatical thoughts aflame. The light, gallant and grandiose, that wanted to tell her that she wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t beautiful because that word just wasn’t enough to describe the lips that painted her face like the delicate stroke of a paintbrush. The word just wasn’t enough to describe the body that held every single one of her exquisitely fascinating fragments of her person inside of it. The word beautiful was not enough to describe that she didn’t hold a candle to the models because she held the burning fire of the sun that was too magnificent to hold in the palm of her hands.