hungry

Fuck food. Sometimes when I can't fall asleep I try to count how many skinny single women I know and how many fat single women I know. I compare them. I try to write a formula that will predict whether I will ever end up with someone. One size 4. Single. One size 12. Single. No dice.

Where is the fois gras and the marshmallow cream when I need it? Why doesn't it fill the void that I feel. It makes me full, but life sometimes leaves me empty. I hum my favorite song to hold back the tears. Like you used to do when you had to get a booster shot. Taste the tears as they're falling. And then my cat does too. Crying feels like eating. A letting go. An indulgence. Leaves you puffy and hurting. Salt-stained and red.

A woman saved her husband from a mountain lion. Stabbed it with her purse pen to save his life. And I stand in my panties in my living room and cry. That's love. Saving someone from a wild animal. But how often do we get the chance to make those grand gestures? Instead, we grow up on Say Anything and Sixteen Candles and we expect someone to be outside our window with a boombox when we get in a fight. And we wake up disappointed and disillusioned.

And then there are the dreams. Of exes. Of trauma. Of making love and of eyelashes blowing in the wind. The dreams where I'm drowning or giving birth. What do they mean?

I see the yellow flowers in the jar, and it reminds me of the jar where our biology teacher used to keep a brain. Preserved in its gray matter. Eternally thinking: how did I end up in this jar? And then there are the pansies that grow near the entrance of Emory, that get ripped up every two weeks. And it makes me think of our pursuit of perfection. Ripping up perfectly good flowers only to replant in a different shade of purple. Like a bruise, changing its color over the week, healing and then turning brown and yellow before the new pink skin pokes through.

And so I guess I can only hope that my purpleness, my rawness, and my tears will give way to that ugly brown and yellow that will mean healing and new skin to come. New skin that's never been touched by tears or even the sun or wind. And then I will allow myself, all over again, to be exposed. To be sunburnt. To be scratched. And I will hope that one day I will heal again.