Goodbye, old flame,

you have washed yourself out.

My heart: your mess.

You say you want to protect me,

to protect us,

that none of this could ever work out.

It can't

but not for the reasons you give.

Your imminent departure is less of an issue

than your absence, is what I mean.

Ithaca means nothing when your heart isn't in it,

and yours isn't.

Has never been.

Will never be.

You kiss me without feeling,

you're Louis XVI to my Marie.

You hold me, your grasp is tight but the connection weak.

I'm trying to stick a magnet to paper.

The motions have been gone through,

will be gone through again.

When you brush your lips against mine, our mouths will be

the only things that touch.

You say you feel for me,

I can't help but read into your words.

You don't feel romantic,

you can't say you care.

You feel pity, for the poor girl with her heart in the place where

her sleeve should be,

clinging to a time, a touch,

that was, like a mirage,

never there.

Happiness is a mirage.

Or so one may think, upon viewing my parents.
My mom has succumbed to the mentality of a woman with a shot metabolism and bad knees: eat whatever you feel like, because the weight will come on, anyway. This is a terrible model for an impressive youth, like myself. 4,000 calories a day (or so I have come to assume after the second evening bowl of ice cream and the third helping of a side-salad) is not okay. I replicate your behaviors, don't you see?! I want to grow old and healthy, and be an elegant, athletic older woman! Your surrender to poor health at fifty years old is like handing me an insulin pump and saying, "Here. You'll need this." Every ounce of fat on me, my ankles, the backs of my knees, my stomach, underarms, it all screams at me to run. You think I do this to myself for vanity, I do it out of fear. I can't become you! I love you, but I won't have a husband who refuses to caress me, who sleeps in a separate room because my snoring is too loud. I will stay young, stay healthy, but, as your daughter, seeing how you managed to gain one hundred forty pounds over the course of thirty years, I'm scared. I look like you looked, at my age. Will I look like you look, at your age? Will my class scream to the world via the amplifiers on my double-chin? Will dessert at a restaurant be a mandate, not an option? Will my beauty become masked by the stifled problems of adulthood in the way of fat, of cake, of utter gluttony?
I fight this. Every day, I fight this. I fight becoming you, as much as I love you, lean on you. I fight the lethargy, the lax vocabulary, the once-starved inner curiosity, now lounging comfortably on an easy chair, lemonade in hand. I pride myself on my curiosity, if nothing else, my hunger for knowledge, for words. I quail the day that I begin to consume more food than fact, that I turn into you. More than this, I fear its inevitability.

This, mom, is why I restrict.