Too Blue, Too Pale
Nora Ray

we can spot beauty
the moment we open our eyes
for the very first
time.

the golden ratio attracts the babies.
they go toward it,
with sparkling eyes,
like a small
eclipse of moths.

one of these babies,
five years later,
gets the comment
from their mom’s friend.
she tells the baby:
“there’s too much hair
on your arms.”
two hours later,
when the house is empty,
the baby locks herself
in the bathroom
to shave
her loathsome arms.

then ten years later,
this hairless queen
with quivering chin,
calls her younger sister
fat.

her skin’s too thin, too thick;
her hair’s too thick, too thin;
her waist’s too thick—never too thin,
but when it’s very, very late—
it is too thin.
too blue, too pale.
her ankles kill the thinness:
they’re too bloated
from
diuretics.

“I didn’t kill my sister,
didn’t, didn’t kill my sister,”
the hairless baby says
thirty years later.

her eyebrows don’t move
anymore.
she needs to gesture—
nodding,
pointing—
to be understood.
shy, the baby’s shy,
hiding her onycholysis
under layers
of lavender nail polish.

it makes her skin look gray,
it feeds her onycholysis,
it harms the exhausted
sea,
but lavender
symbolizes beauty,
so she chooses it
and applies it
and dries it
and wears it
with a smile and sparkling eyes,
like a little baby moth.

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Nora Ray’s Comments

When I was younger, I used to scroll through eating disorders forums, and I came across a story about a young girl bedridden in the hospital. She told her friend she was going to be fine, laughing, even though her ankles were bloated from diuretics. I know ED is often considered a taboo thing to write about, but it exists and it’s ugly.

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