Despertar

coffee and chocolate

I have lost eight pounds. Since the break-up. Yay! This is good news, because I had started to creep up into that comfortable heaviness, none of my favorite jeans were fitting, twos that used to hang fit perfectly. I pulled on a skirt and the button flew off projectile-style. Et cetera. Driving home from Greenbelt, my esophagus crackling, I realized I hadn't eaten anything since yesterday, and that was just half a grilled cheese and a few cherry tomatoes.

I am sick. It's sick. Life is a sick, weird thing, when being hungry feels good. When, yay, I can almost fit into a zero again. When I fully acknowledge it's because I feel stressed and empty without some guy around. Where are my priorities? Where is my inner compass? If I believed in God, would I value the packaging He chose for my soul no matter how big it got? No matter what Justin said or did?

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Your thoughts turn inward, to your relationship with your body. Three days after the wedding I went to this weekend, my hips still hurt from swing dancing with my old classmates. I would have never noticed that two weeks ago. I snapped so much, that whole night, that my right middle finger and thumb still throb when I touch things. It was incredibly fun and it came at just the right time. I've still got mosquito bites. Stray freckles of glitter, from the dress.

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It's like when I was working at the firm over the summer, and Jake and I downed cup after cup of coffee every day. Both of us kind of giddy about the amazing opportunity they had given us, and looking for ways to feed into that high. The first cup when we first walked in, the second around eleven, the third over lunch. Two more before the day ended. Then I'd drive home so wired I could barely read the traffic lights, and lie awake for hours with my thoughts racing.

I don't pretend to understand the compulsion that makes people cut themselves, and I'm sure I couldn't sustain an eating disorder, but I do sort of get it, how feelings grow so big, they can't only be feelings. How you have to sort of reign them in by resorting to extremes. So jumpy you can barely fall asleep. So hungry you can barely stand up straight. And so forth.

Really, this could not have come at a better time. I'm clearly not prepared to serve as someone's better half.

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Intermediate crushes sustain me in between real-life loves. They are always women. Nothing sexual, just new people to obsess over. My current mistress is getting me through this, slowly but surely, her fierce vulnerability a perfect distraction. This all would have been so much easier, had I been born a boy. I'd never know the whole thing of dying a death of emotion and estrogen, would never give a shit that the Justins of the world are still beautiful and perfect even after they decide they're too immature to commit. I'd just move to New York, weasel my way into her good graces and dote on her the way I wish someone ever would on me. Buy her Christian Louboutins and feed her Belgian chocolate, regularly send her into Jappy ecstasy.

But I don't want a Stacy London, I want a Justin. I want to forgive him for this, already, and finish what we started. I want to fall asleep with my hand on his chest, gain my eight pounds back and find my way back to what I was conveniently mistaking for internal stability.