Eating Slop

Remember that part in the last subheader where I said I work in an office now

            I keep telling people I don’t have any morals and they never seem to believe me. Maybe they are confusing the self-awareness that I lack a moral conscience for a moral conscience. Maybe they are ascribing some self-flagellating intent to me telling them that I don’t have any morals. Maybe they see something that I cannot. A random man from New Jersey recently told me that I seem to exhibit “guilty body language.” No one else here tonight wore a red dress, he informed me. He accused me of enjoying being looked at, an observation he apparently made earlier in the evening before we spoke; I was unsure if the irony of him obliging me to such an extent was lost on him. I was tempted to ask him if he made a habit of mentally tallying how many women in any given room are wearing a red dress. I asked him instead if he wanted a blue Sour Straw. “No thanks, I wish I could do the flirty thing, but I’m too tired,” he said, putting his hand on my knee. I ran away from him in beautiful shoes that ripped my pinky toenails off and left spots of blood on my socks. Laundry day soon. What one gets for speaking to people driven in from New Jersey.

           On the right side of the Hudson, I am feeling myself dissolving more with every passing day, a strange state of being in which I feel at once rabidly selfish, washing up places on currents of unchecked desire, pure id, and yet also completely disembodied and unable to view myself through whatever prism of imagined objectivity usually allows people to construct a “self-image.” I think this is what being a housecat must be like, unburdened by questions of why you are attracted to the fishy brown slop with the consistency of paste that appears in the bowl as if by magic and aware of very little other than that you are, intensely so. I have a few memories from early childhood, and one very vivid one from first grade in which my teacher was trying to explain the linearity of time. “One day, right now will be history,” he said to a room of five-year-olds. I used to view myself in the context of my past, cross-referencing my behavioral patterns and self-perception with other selves on my timeline almost automatically. Mining for signs of progress, perhaps? Hoping to create a composite me of those past and present, who would be the “true” one? I used to think this was an excessively introspective thing to do, but can now appreciate that it had some kind of grounding effect. At least, the current iteration of me can, the one who feels lost in her present and wonders when the slop will stop tasting so damn good. But maybe I’m just twenty-two, or drinking too many vodka sodas.

            Or maybe it is all starting to slip again. This has happened twice before; the first time when I was sixteen and riding the train home from school by myself and fainted for no apparent reason. I was sitting so I was fine, but this was chance, and whatever evolutionary guardrails that ordinarily funnel one’s consciousness along the track that bypasses constant acute awareness that one could die at any time for any reason disintegrated. I spent months lying on the floor in a corner of the library during my lunch period, complaining of full-body numbness and a literal feeling of staticky vibration in my brain that no doctor could verify. I’m sure my teachers thought I was on drugs. I wasn’t, at the time. I remained a solidly A- student.

            The second time began after I read too many conflicting schools of thought about which foods can kill you and decided the answer was all of them. Animal products were no good, processed foods of any kind, carbs no good at all, tofu would maybe shrink my tits, fruit had too much sugar, salt was granulated cardiac arrest, oil to be used extremely sparingly, even extra-virgin olive. This left me with, uh, not much and became a hole that took me months to dig myself out of. When I began to eat freely again I was dizzied by how unchaperoned I felt, realizing that I or anyone else could theoretically never stop eating every moment of their waking hours. “I don’t know how to explain it…I feel like I could start screaming in the middle of the street for no reason. Or knock all the pickle jars off the shelf in Tesco,” I said to my friend. “You…could,” she warily affirmed. Call of the void and all that; terrified of entropy both times, clawing at the edges of the whole thing in desperate search of some kind of boundary.

            This time I have been left alone for too many days. I moved into a sublet where I’m not sure all my roommates know my name and I don’t feel compelled to alter this state of affairs. I slip in and out to eat sandwiches standing up in the kitchen at 3 a.m., shave my shins in the tub and sleep on a mattress on the floor, my nightcreature comings and goings unsurveilled. I go to work and answer phones sometimes and print things other times but am mostly unattended, injuring my neck from headbanging too hard during my solo dance party in the copy room, wandering up and down flights of stairs to stave off the sleep I should be getting, imagining dragging my oily fingerpads along the unprotected paintings on the walls. I once paused at a staircase with an empty space behind it, seriously considering napping there. Dying there and no one noticing until it started to smell. They’d call the extension for security. The little TV in the elevator always asks me if I know that half of humanity will be diagnosed with cancer in their lives before it tells me how the Broncos are doing.

            I went instead to an unused office and leaned against the window, watching the ferries dutifully chug to and fro various extraneous islands below, waving at the new World Trade Center and thinking about all the things I could do in this room without anyone knowing: get drunk on a Poland Spring bottle filled with vodka or gin. Acrobatics. Aerobics. Host some kind of deranged tryst in which a single errant staple would inevitably imprint itself on my asscheek. I darted out of the room, suddenly seized by anxiety that someone might have asked me to do something for once and clicking my inbox open in a panic; no new messages. Just days spent unaccounted for on the wrong side of a window, forgetting what it felt like to wake up that morning. Eating slop.