Sugar-free Red Bull

Algebra sheet limp beneath my elbow,
mocking me in equations I’ll never understand.
I open Google Classroom like a coffin.
The deadlines stack up
in a mound of unmarked corpses,
in a thousand unmarked graves,
in old, unmarked sections of my mind—
I'd name them here, but who cares?
I’m too tired to mourn them.

Sugar-free Red Bull—
because I don't sleep,
because I care more about the number on a scale
than the ones on my grade report.

This could be a cry for help,
but hunger feels like control.
I'm proud of my successes
and furious at my downfalls.
(I was told that line was too clean;
I told them there's nothing clean
about starving yourself
for adrenaline)
I skip every outing with food,
because I don’t trust myself
near cake or kindness.

This body is tired
of being punished
for not being perfect.

I used to laugh.
Used to blow out birthday candles
without wishing about numbers.
Used to read like it was breathing.
Used to say yes— to pizza, to people,
to living.

I was a star student.
Straight A’s.
Sticky notes with dreams on them.
Friends who thought I was funny,
teachers who said I’d go far.

The world asked for excellence;
I gave it my childhood.

And what did it give me back?
A mind that only speaks in panic.
The hollow ache of every missed meal,
every missed moment.

Counting calories 
like rosary beads.
Repentance
for every digit
comes as self-loathing at night
rolling the acidic taste of every 
"but you used to be happy"
underneath my tongue.

The irony
that algreba class is my lowest grade
when I'm consumed by math every single day—
How slow can one get
to one thousand?
If the chips I ate yesterday equal two hundred,
and this drink is ten...
I didn't always think of food as numbers—
maybe that's why I hate algebra.

Maybe that's why I hate everything.

Copyright © Hanna Joyton | Year Posted 2025

Please Login to post a comment