Page 81 of Guy's Girl
“What about you?” she asks.
“Whataboutme?”
“Are you hiding from anything?”
He doesn’t respond. He turns to the Danube, his shoulders rising and falling with the lilt of the waves.
It’s my second to last night in Hungary, and something bizarre just happened. I was sitting on the sofa next to Adrian. Eszter was on his other side, Imre in the armchair. Adrian had somehow fixed the old TV set, and we were watching a movie on VHS. Seriously. VHS. I couldn’t tell you the last time I even saw one of those, but his grandparents have a whole collection.
Eszter chose the movie. She rattled on about the collection, pulling options and showing them to the room, to which Adrian and Imre would either yell, “Igen!” or “Nem!” They couldn’t agree on anything. Finally, Eszter waved them both away and picked out a movie herself.
“What are we watching?” I asked Adrian.
“Pirates of the Caribbean,”he said.
I almost spit out the water I had just sipped. “That’s the movie your grandmother chose?”
“Don’t let her hardened exterior fool you, Ginny. She’s a romantic at heart.”
Thankfully, the movie was subtitled in Hungarian, not dubbed. It had been years since I watchedPirates. I forgothow fun the movie was. I laughed. I gripped the sofa. I almost grabbed Adrian’s hand at several points but managed to stop myself.
None of that was unusual. I always get too invested in fictional characters. I always feel exactly what the writers and directors want me to feel. What was unusual was this: at the end of the movie, when Elizabeth and Will Turner finally kissed, I started to cry.
And I don’t just mean a few tears. I don’t mean glassy eyes and a trickling nose. I mean sobs. I mean a full, gushing, torrential waterfall. Hiccupping inhales and a shaking chest. As the credits rolled, Adrian turned to me, alarmed. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said through a gasp. “Yes, I’m fine. I just, um. I need—” I stood up. “I’ll be in my room.” Then I ran away before I could see the look on his grandparents’ faces.
I closed my door and buried my face in my pillow. Only then did I let the full extent of my emotion come out: heaving sobs, gasping inhales, cries that, were they not blocked by a pillow, would have sounded like a strange mix between screaming and laughing uncontrollably.
I’m still crying. I can’t make it stop. Even as I write this, tears are falling onto the page, blotting the paper, creating little wrinkles. Several times, I’ve had to stop writing altogether because my eyes were too filled with water to see.
I’m scared Adrian is going to walk in. I’m scared he’s going to see the truth of what I am: a wreck, a disaster, a being filled with unexplainable darkness.
I don’t understand what’s happening to me.Pirates of the Caribbeanisn’t even a sad movie. It’s the opposite. It’s a happy movie with a happy ending. Where the fuck did all these tears come from?
My only guess is this: at the very moment when Will kissed Elizabeth, when it became clear that they would get their happy ending, I thought to myself:I will never have that.
The thought played over and over in my head, a song I did not want to hear; but the moment it began I knew I believed it to be true. I hate men. Yet I crave love so badly it feels like a gap is sawing its way open in my chest, starting as nothing more than a pinprick and working its way out, hollowing me, making real the emptiness I feel.
I will never have that.
I will never have that.
I will never be loved.
I don’t even deserve it.
As I write those words, I cry harder, but the sadness does not diminish. It expands. It fills every limb of my body. I don’t think I’m even upset about the movie anymore. I’m just upset. And I can’t make it go away. I can only conclude that I do not like myself one bit. That the sadness I feel is a sadness without cause, a despair capable of sitting at bay for long periods of time or of washing over me all at once, without warning and often at the most inopportune moments.
That’s it. That’s my secret. Nothing more, nothing less. This is the beast, the one I’ve feared for so long. I see now that everything I do, all day long—the obsessive exercise, the heady starvation, the hunger that cannot be satisfied until it is stuffed to the point of physical pain and then released in a bundle of stomach acid and salt—is done to keep that hurt at bay.
The creature within me—it is made up of every insecurity, every ounce of low self-esteem, every wrongdoing, every mistake, every man I slept with who never loved me. Every reason to hate the very skin I walk in. It craves validation andfears failure. It dictates my every decision, from what time I wake up in the morning to how many slices of bread I might eat in a given day.
I don’t think I was even capable of experiencing true sadness before now. That’s what anorexia and bulimia do—they numb you out, erase your emotions, make it so that all you think about is food, food, food. But now that I’m eating—and keeping it down—everything else is coming back up. All of it. Every emotion I spent the last seven years suppressing.
I wish my heart would fall out of my chest and pull my misery with it.
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