Before You Sleep
Tonight, you make salad. Because everyone knows—there are polls—that salad is good for you, that even when thickly coated in sugary balsamic dressing, such items as romaine lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, green onions, cilantro, and cubed chicken breast remain, at least at their core, low in calorie.
So, you eat that.
For dessert—recompense for the endurance of healthy food—you tuck into a lap-sized bowl (kiddie pool?) of popcorn. Because everyone knows—there are studies—that since popcorn is mostly fiber, it is therefore mostly nothing else. Again, never mind that butter bath.
Afterward: that familiar guilt and lethargy your therapist once referred to as depression, but you know better. The natural next step is to cyber stalk your ex, who long ago moved far away from San Francisco and is of course doing great: at the lake, on water skis, snorkeling in the tropics. You see washboard abs, perfect skin, bodies laughing, jumping, splashing—my god look at all those new friends—and while your ex often snuck through the sheets to whisper into your ear that you were perfect—perfect just the way you were—you have since uncovered the truth: like everyone else in your life who once purported to care, at least when they needed a cat sitter, you were just being told what you wanted to hear.
Next, you consider reinstating your dating profile—those decade-old photos should suffice—back when your face looked thinner, your skin seemed clearer, and life felt brighter because there was just so much more of it ahead of you. Your thumb hovers over the app. Maybe this time you will meet the one—or perhaps the one before the one…before the one?—and while baiting your hook with forty-five percent obsolete images is at best sixty-five percent honest, historical data suggests these people will never know you well enough to notice the differences anyway: the squishy stomach nor sagging underarms that contain evidence, somewhere under there, diligent exercise occurring in your early twenties.
Your phone buzzes. Wishing you were only partially excited, you flip it over: just a follow-up email from Apple support. You let go a long sigh. As the title of the unread book on your bedside table suggests, is it true that increased self-confidence equals increased friends? Maybe if you could actually button up those old jeans? Because everyone knows that finally leaving the house is easier when clothing fits the way it is supposed to. Once, you attempted a three day fast, an experiment that ended suddenly, wildly, and spanned multiple trips to frozen dessert aisles. You pause—there is a familiar twitch in your abdomen. Your face finds your hands and thumbs squeeze across crusted, tired eyes as you negotiate the confusing pull of mutually exclusive motivations—where the act of eating less makes you feel just as good about yourself as the act of eating more.
As you stare at the kitchen clock, wondering again where all the years have gone, you find yourself devouring a large block of Swiss cheese. This is fully justified. Especially considering that Instagram meme about dairy helping calm a sleepless mind which loves to stay up at night thinking of all the reasons, everywhere.
In your bedroom, while waiting for cheese to work, you set up your dating profile and delete it again, create several collatable to-do lists, briefly weigh the privileges of belonging to a twenty-four-hour gym against the advantages of residing in a city built upon unreasonably steep hills. No to all of that. You lie in bed and stare up into the nothing, which seems, even more than last night, to have widened, deepened in its noncolor, grown in its greater expression of voidness—when you surmise that ice cream isn’t necessarily the answer but perhaps a good enough question.
Moments later, you stand shivering before your glowing freezer. Because ice cream, once purchased, never actually makes it to the freezer, you pull open the fridge. Your wavering hand, quite possibly self-aware, approaches the shelves of cold cuts, its fingers climbing steplike cliffs of sliced ham and traversing thick, pink coils of turkey breast. Low in calories, the turkey is your obvious candidate for mayonnaise—like some low carb comfort taco. Holy shit, food tastes good. Your hands keep digging—is that hummus? What about pita chips? You snatch a bag from the cupboard. Before digging in, you pause just long enough to quash a fresh wave of guilt by reminding yourself that personal accountability just isn’t a thing, especially at night. The mouth, for example, whose close proximity to a brain on Prozac has done nothing to mitigate its terrible choices. Other guilty parties: The feet—willful, shameless—who ignore direct commands as they walk the underutilized sidewalks of your neighborhood in search of that diner which never seems to close. Their menu, also a culpable party, features doughy, dripping slabs of pizza and those thick milkshakes swirled with chopped up gummy bears.
After polishing off the pita chips, you step away from the cold light, allowing the fridge to swing shut. Wincing, you direct yourself back into bed. Your insides feel leaden, drum tight. It hurts to lay on your side, so you stretch out on your back like a starfish. Even in your bloated state, the later it gets the more you wish for hunger to return. You and your ex used to visit that diner in the middle of the night—either after sex, or before sleep or because love isn’t blind so much as it is ravenous—walked there in your slippers and PJs and both ate and laughed and discussed The Future—your shared, beautifully intertwined timelines—of glaciers to climb, canyons to hike, of buying a home in an obscure country or raising a family on a farm. Under these very sheets, you would both talk about larger questions—the meaning of it all and the possible, comical lack thereof—that perhaps all we truly possess in this life is love of self and love of others, and how there is just so much more to this experience than surrendering to pain, to lying prone beneath a widening sky, that eternal shape of unlived dreams, and wondering, hours into a restless sleep, if at times the stories we tell ourselves may not be true.
