This picture scares the hell out of me.

The day this picture was taken, I was twenty years old. I had a good job in Corporate America, a nice apartment in a nice quiet town, a new car, and a partner who claimed to love me unconditionally. I was thin and beautiful, and if you didn't look too closely at my life, you might have thought I was happy.

Most people didn't look too closely, because I was twenty and thin and beautiful.

I found this picture a few months ago, while I was going through a box of papers I'd put aside not long after it was taken. It stunned me like a slap across the face, like the sound of breaking glass. It still does. I can't look at it without flinching, and I hope I never can.

Part of me wants to burn this picture, the way I've burned so many other pieces of my life from those years. More than once I've been tempted to light a candle and hold it to the flame, knowing it would be so easy to watch it blacken and curl and fall into ashes. Failing that, I know I could simply put it back in a box, put it back out of sight and out of memory with all the other relics of my past.

But I won't.

Instead, I'll keep it, and I'll keep it out. Keep it where I can see it, keep it to remind me, because I don't ever want to forget what it was like to be twenty and thin and beautiful.

I don't ever want to forget what it was like to starve myself every day, to count the hours until I could eat again, to count the calories in every piece of food that came within ten feet of my body. I don't ever want to forget the chalky taste of SlimFast, or the exhaustion of trying to live on a diet of vegetables.

I don't ever want to forget the guilt when I'd let myself eat properly, or the way it felt to look in the mirror and see my reflection through the distortion of self-loathing. I don't ever want to forget the sound of my partner's voice when he told me I'd be so beautiful if I just lost five pounds, or the sound of my voice, raw and rough from crying.

And I don't ever want to forget what it was like to be so broken and bruised and torn.

This picture reminds me of all those things, which is why I'll keep it. I'll keep it, because it's all too easy for me to forget, these days, what it was like to be twenty and thin and beautiful.

These days, I'm only barely recognizable as the girl in this picture, and that's fine by me. My body is worn and marked from the things I've lived through: there are lines around my eyes, stretchmarks on my breasts and my belly and my hips, curves and softness in places that were once flat and taut.

The changes that mean the most, though, are the ones you can't see unless you look closely at my life. They're the changes that left me with a career that I love even though doesn't pay worth a damn, with a life in the middle of New York City, with no form of transportation save my own two legs and the Metrocard in my back pocket. They're the changes that took me away from the partner who loved me only when I was twenty and thin and beautiful, and left me instead with three partners who love me for who I am and who I'll be in the years to come.

They're the changes that took me from broken and bruised and torn to whole and strong and sane.

And while I'm not twenty or thin anymore, I am still beautiful.

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