Page 77 of The Cabin
I can’t help wondering what that means, and then further wondering if maybe I know what it means, but I just don’t want to admit it.
Time to go spend the rest of the day worrying about what I’m going to wear on this date-not-date.
Is it a date?
Do I want it to be a date?I head inside and paw through my hanging clothes, dresses, skirts, blouses. And while I’m trying on outfits, I’m also trying on, experimentally, how it would feel to let myself admit that tonight with Nathan is a date and that I do in fact want it to be.
I can’t quite get there.
I haven’t been on a date, as in a getting-to-know-you-because-I-think-I-like-you type of way, since I met Adrian freshman year of college. Which feels like a long, long time ago. Because, damn, it was. I was nineteen when I met him. That’s almost twenty years ago.
Makes me feel old.
I like Nathan. That’s an established fact. But I hate how that feels, sounds—like I’m a sixth-grader with my first crush. Do you like me, check yes or no. But what other language is there for this feeling? I appreciate who he is. I enjoy spending time around him. Conversation with him is easy, natural, and lively. I feel safe around him. At no point has he ever done or said anything that makes me feel physically uncomfortable, pushed past my limits of propriety and comfort. He doesn’t look at me like I’m a piece of meat.
Which, I mean, until lately, at least, there wasn’t any meat on me for him to be looking at me in that way anyhow. I was emaciated. By the time I got that letter from Adrian, I was working a hundred hours a week, sleeping four or five hours a night max, and eating maybe a thousand calories a day, most of the time far less, and what I did eat was largely nutritionally useless, bits of fruit, some cheese, a microwavable frozen burrito from Costco, half a bagel dipped in cream cheese as I drove to work.
I’m back to normal, to some degree. I’m not even doing yoga. I’m eating, sleeping, and relaxing. Reading. I barely have what you could call a hobby. I’ve read almost all the books in the loft library, which is going to start prompting more trips to the library in town, especially now that I’ve been there with Nathan. I’ve put on plenty of weight, which for the first time in my entire life is a good thing. I not only need to wear a bra again, I’m not cinching it to the tightest set of clasps anymore. My jeans don’t hang off my hips anymore. My yoga pants are actually stretched around my legs instead of flapping loosely. My fitted T-shirts fit like they’re supposed to. I can actually look in the mirror and not cringe.
Case in point, for the first time in months, if not more than a year, I strip naked and stand in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door, and look at myself. I don’t know that I feel pretty, yet, but that’s likely as much a mental hang-up as it is anything to do with what I actually look like. My hair has its luster back, glossy and full of life again, although I badly need to trim my ends. My skin isn’t papery thin and dry and sallow anymore, or pale. I’ve always been on the more svelte side, but I finally once again have something like feminine curves, and I like that.
Feeling pretty, let alone beautiful or desired, though? That’s going to take a hell of a lot more than filling out my bra and underwear again. That’s heart work. You have to like yourself to feel beautiful. You have to be desired by someone to feel desirable. I’m not sure I’m in a place where either is possible. I’m getting there, slowly, but I’m not there yet.
And I think…if I’m going to be brutally honest with myself, part of me doesn’t want to get there. Liking myself enough to feel beautiful and having someone in my life that desires me so that I feel desirable again means I’ll have moved on. Left Adrian behind. Forgotten him.
Let him go.
I’m not ready to do that.
I’ll never be ready to do that.
So why am I going on a date with Nathan?
Because of that other part of me, which does want to feel beautiful and desirable, and if not cherished and loved again, at least admired and liked.
I know it’s very unfair to Nathan, but I’m going into this date-not-date holding a lot back. Knowing I’m doing something that I know I’m not psychologically or emotionally prepared to allow, not in the fullness of what it is, and could or should be.
