Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

by Emily R. Austin

I feel like my ribs are a birdcage and my heart is a bird on fire.

It turns out the crackers I stole are the body of Christ. After eating more than half the bag, I googled the cracker brand and learned that I paired marble Cracker Barrel cheese with God’s transubstantiated body.

“When did you come out?” Eleanor asked me. We were on our second date. I never know how to answer that question because I don’t feel like I am out. I feel like I am in a constant state of coming out, and like I always will be. I have to come out every time I meet someone.

I tried to spend my morning making the people around me happier and I’ve been rewarded with a bruised skull, scalded hands, an unwanted date with a guy, and a panic attack.

I feel like a foreign object inside of a body, waiting to be rejected.

You shouldn’t kill yourself when you still want to eat.

I came to the realization that every moment exists in perpetuity regardless of whether it’s remembered. What has happened has happened; it occupies that moment in time forever.

My mother had a baby, and her mother had a baby, and her mother had a baby. Every woman in my family before me lived to have a baby—just so that baby could grow up to have another baby. If I don’t have a baby, then all of those women reproduced just so that I could exist. I am the final product. I am the final baby.

It’s strange people don’t like how their bodies look. It’s strange we waste any of our time concerning ourselves with how our skin drapes over our bones or how fat cultivates.