Feature: I Was in the Alley Where Discipline and Masochism Exchange Punches

By Allyson Castles

The thing that is really hard,
and really amazing,
is giving up on being perfect,
and beginning the work of being yourself.
Anna Quindlen
 
Your perfection is your destruction, he says,
before sneaking out the door,
my scale hidden stealthily under his jacket.
To believe him would be to give in.

In the closet, hard plastic hangers
rest solemnly, oblivious,
and are cradled by blood red, then pumpkin orange
and Steelers yellow.
Blouses and sweaters and tank tops and t-shirts
stand erect and ordered as
sticks of wax in a box labeled “Crayola”.
The door swings open
and I feel an insurmountable urge
to throw out a striped sweater I love,
because where does it fit?
 
My pantry is stocked like this:
Vegetables in watery crimson broth sit
stagnant in their aluminum prisons, next to
salty cardboard wafers, too fibrous and tough
for my intestines to tackle, next to
flimsy trays which house quarter-servings
of brittle noodles and tiny foil packets
of Thai spices. A contact-papered wooden shelf, and
then
bright cans of Folgers, unsweetened sugar in its
many Pepto-Bismol pink envelopes, a height-aligned
row of my friends Duncan Hines, Betty Crocker, Milton
Hershey,
who wait patiently in the tenebrous cupboard
until someone’s birthday calls for a celebration. And
the penthouse
is stacked and stuffed with the most fearsome items—
bags of evil starchy pommes de terre, spaghetti
and lasagna and linguini, innumerable
boxes of cereal that lurk around when the sun
goes down and prey on me.
 
He is gone, and I look through the glass at her
weary and dismayed countenance, at her
flawed skin and awful makeup, at her
strange body, whose cellulite responds to
neither asceticism nor exercise, at her
untoned belly, with its menacing threat to
rebel with one slip-up, at her
eyes, swallowed in an ocean of dark vessels
concealer cannot protect them from, at her
eyes, drowning her cheeks in tiny tsunamis of
salt and black charcoal, at her
eyes.
 
And I tell her, disdainfully,
the line that should have been delivered to her:
Your perfection is your destruction