He comes by for lunch, and we talk without stumbling. We only once end up staring – gazing, really – into each other’s eyes for too long, and we recover pretty well, all things considered. I don’t ask him about her, though I think I could; he doesn’t ask me about you, though he usually does. We talk weekends and life plans and tomato soup. No mention of electricity, or charge, or gravity.
I watch the clouds out the window and try to bare myself to honesty. Is it okay for us to sidestep neatly around the elephant in the room? It is obvious like a wound: I still want to kiss him, and his eyes tell me he still wants to kiss me. His body tells me, in the way he leans forward sometimes, the way his hand begins to lift then falls back down. The way he watches my mouth when I talk.
But we don’t kiss. We hug, tight and long, wish each other safe travels and depart. End of story, but for the promise that we’ll stay in touch.
Part of me wants to tell him that I thought about him in the rain the other night, that I stopped myself from calling him because that’s what we’d agreed upon, I didn’t want to overstep the boundary we had drawn. But I wanted to call him, to hear his voice and, more, to feel his touch. But I didn’t call, and I don’t tell him that I might have. Just allow our hug to last a little longer, let his eyelashes brush my cheek. When he leaves, I am okay, but I wish he hadn’t. At this point it is mere attachment, an antidote to loneliness. Recognizing that, I can let him go.
However.
Suddenly, today, I feel gross: my body is betraying me. I feel sludgy and sniffly and slothful. Fat. I want to go running or do yoga or something, but all I end up doing is sitting on my couch, draining my skull into the Internet. My muscles all scream at me to get up, get up! Move! But I just don’t have the motivation today. It’s too grey out, too wet, too cold, then too dark. I don’t have the right shoes. I’m too tired. So I eat some more, some crap because it’s what I’ve got, betray my body.
A temple, they tell us, and they’re right. My body is all I’ve got to carry me around from now until forever, and I’ve got no right to abuse it like I do. And I’m not even all that bad – I don’t smoke, I don’t eat meat. I usually don’t drink too much. But it could be better: The drag in my gut tells me so, without a doubt.
Funny that all the diets – not the diet diets, I don’t mean How to Lose 50 Lbs in Two Days With NO Effort! I mean all the medical diets, like How Not To Die of Heart Disease – they all say the same thing: Eat lots of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, beans. Eat meat and dairy in moderation. Avoid refined flour and sugar. All of them, the same thing: Diabetes, heart disease, obesity. Limit your fat and sugar. Hypoglycemia, ADD. Drink lots of water. Cancer. Eat a variety of fresh foods in season, don’t drink soda, lots of fiber. They all say the same thing: Eat from the earth.
And I try. Rice and beans are cheap and easy, but I still find myself eating macaroni and cheese more often, which isn’t any cheaper and only marginally faster. And it is not really any better tasting, and it certainly doesn’t make me feel better. In fact, cheese makes me feel gross. But it tastes good, so I eat it, eat it, eat it. What’s with that? Why can’t I make the choice to eat well, every time? I can feel it when I don’t, immediately and distinctly, when I eat the highly processed, high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt crap that proliferates on every grocery store shelf and restaurant menu. I can feel it when I eat too much, when I get caught in the rhythm of eating and lose the point of it, when I finish my plate just to show (who? why?) that I can. Half the time I am thinking I shouldn’t eat this the whole time I am eating, or I should stop already while I continue to shovel it into my mouth.
This whole non-judgment thing is a struggle for me, by the way. It’s far, far easier to say, goddammit, why can’t you just stop when you want to, why can’t you eat right, why can’t you get up and take a goddamn walk, lazy lazy fat...
And so much harder to say, this is what I need right now, this is where I am right now, my self control is weaker than it used to be but that’s okay. Neither am I starving myself, neither am I hurting myself. Just eating. Eating is good.
And to remember that yes, I do usually eat the healthier foods over the less healthy – tonight at dinner I got a salad, because even though I hate being the girl who orders just a salad (when did eating so much get wrapped up into my sense of self?), I wanted green things and I wasn’t very hungry. But even then, I ate more than I needed too, insisted on dessert. But then I picked the fat-free pound cake and strawberries for dessert, because I was too full to even consider anything with the word chocolate in the title, much less with words like decadent chocolate supreme super-fudge. So it’s a struggle, between what my body really wants, what I really want, and the crap that I do anyway. Crap is not a very descriptive word: all the self-destructive, careless, mindless things I do anyway. All the things that make my body feel unhealthy, that make my body unhealthy.
Breathe, breathe. At least I can see what I’m doing, right? And can work to change it. No more shoulds: I will eat more vegetables, I will walk to school every day, even if it’s raining. I will remember to breathe at stoplights. I will not look in the mirror so often. I will sit with better posture.
I will stop talking about myself so damn much.
This is all getting on my nerves, today. Not to get too meta about it, but I’ve written thirty thousand words in three weeks, all about myself. And I’m sick of me. But I’ve got twenty thousand words and one week left to go, and yes, I’ve figured out some fairly important stuff, but, really.
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