Page 98 of Guy's Girl
It’s a familiar feeling. Yet another instance in a long line of relationships where he attaches himself to someone, letsthemattach to him, and then feels nothing when he leaves. It happened with every girl in college. It happened with Ginny. Where does his sadness go? It’s like he can’t process goodbyes.
Where has that gotten him? Sure, he might have made a girl fall in love with him, but he’s good at that, isn’t he? And the more unrequited love he collects, the more alone he feels.
He thinks, then, of his conversation with Ginny about trauma. About how trauma occurs when something bad happens to you, but you feel no emotion around it.
Maybe that’s where my trauma comes from, he thinks.That’s my story. A long line of unacknowledged goodbyes.
Every night, after dinner, Ginny, Heather, and the boys watch an episode ofGrey’s Anatomy. They want to keep her busy, to keep her from purging. She knows it. At first, they suggested games, but Ginny found that, after enduring yet another day of being alive, she was too exhausted to pay attention to the cards. So.Grey’s Anatomyit was.
They made Ginny choose what to watch. She pickedGrey’sat random, hoping the rainy Seattle weather and the simplicity of early 2000’s television would put her at ease. Part of her was embarrassed; she couldn’t have picked a girlier show, and she assumed the boys would roll their eyes. And they did, at first. But by episode four, the boys were the ones yelling at the TV, Clay throwing popcorn kernels at the screen and saying things like, “How the fuck could Meredith do that to George?”
In her free time, she writes. She doesn’t know exactly what she’s working toward—a book of essays, or a novel, maybe? It doesn’t much matter. She writes not with a project in mind but purely because she has to, because when it’s 9 a.m. and she crawls out of bed, looks in the mirror, and loathes every inch of her body, or when it’s 3 p.m. and she feels, for no specific reason whatsoever, that she is going to die, writing is her first instinct. It’s the only thing shecando.
By the time she goes to bed each night, she doesn’t even have the energy to hate herself.
I want Adrian so badly it hurts. I crave him the same way I once craved the donuts I was never allowed to eat.
Whenever I remember that he doesn’t love me, I press together all five of the fingertips from my right hand, making a cone, and then I grab that cone with my left hand and squeeze as hard as I possibly can.
Everyone says—wait until. Wait until you’re secure withyourself, and haveyourselffigured out, before getting into a serious relationship. But what if this is it? What if I’m always going to be this anxious, this unhappy, for the rest of my fucking life?
He is never going to like you, he is never going to like you, he is never going to like you, he is never going to like you, you are living a fantasy, you are living a fantasy, you are living a fantasy, you are living a fantasy, stop crying.
Ginny opens up Google. Types:how to stop loving someone. Stares at the search bar for too long. Deletes the words without searching.
The package arrives on his doorstep five days after he gets home. The return address is Szentendre. He turns it over in his hands, curious. It’s heavy. Multiple objects rattle about inside. Did he leave something in Hungary?
He fetches a knife from the kitchen and slices open the packaging. Inside, the first thing he sees is a two-liter Coca-Cola bottle filled with a dark red liquor. He smiles, knowing exactly what it is. He picks it up and sets it on the counter.
Underneath, he finds a thick, leather-bound book with a blank cover. He blinks, trying to place it. He knows he’s seen it before.
And then he remembers.
He’s back in his grandparents’ house, staring from the bottom step of the staircase at Ginny and hisnagyapa, seated on the couch. There’s something on Ginny’s lap, something he cannot see. She and hisnagyapaare smiling at each other like they’ve been best friends for ages.
That’s when he feels it. When his heart does that weird squeezing thing, and he has the abrupt thought that, if anything were to happen to either of the people on that sofa, he would descend into a darkness so black that he would never be able to find his way back out.
He hates the feeling as soon as it hits him. He wants to erase it. He wants to crawl out of his skin and replace it with someone else’s body.
Then he walks over and sees what they’re looking at. He sees his father. Dozens of versions of him—maybe even hundreds. Photographs he’s never seen, never even knew existed. And allthoughts of the previous sensation are quickly wiped from his mind.
Now Adrian reaches down and picks up the photo album from inside the box. He lifts it gingerly as if afraid it might break. When he does, he sees one last item sitting on the cardboard: an envelope with his name on it.
The envelope is green, the same color as his bedroom in Szentendre. His name is written in hisnagyanya’s familiar scrawl. Adrian stares at the envelope for a long time, the photo album dangling at his side. He stares so long that his eyes start to dry. Then he lays the album back inside the box, over the envelope, opens his closet, and tucks the whole thing into the back, behind his dress shoes.
I don’t see how anyone could possibly love me when I look like this. I don’t see how anyone could love me, period, riddled as I am with anxiety, obsession, sadness, and these long, rolling hills of fat.
Where do people get self-confidence? Are you born with it? Or is it earned, fought for, won, all part of some fucked-up battle with your own mind?
I am so fat, and everyone else is so thin.
Okay. I’m not actually fat. But there’s this selfie I took of Heather and me where my arm and my shoulder and my tits and my face look just... round. That’s the only way I can say it. I used to be lean and hard. Now I am round and soft. It makes me want to die.
Anxiety is both delicate and all-consuming. It buzzes within Ginny, a tightening of the heart, a breeze in her veins. She didn’t hate her body before. That was the whole point of her eating disorder: to keep enough weight off that she didn’t have to think about her body one way or another. But she does now. God, does she ever. She cannot believe that this is what she looks like. She cannot believe that this is the way she will look for the rest of her life. It makes her want to restrict, restrict, restrict.
As she recovers from the trauma that is bulimia, she feels her sister return. She sees her beckon with open arms and a blade-thin smile. Anorexia. Beautiful, perfect Anorexia.
How does everyone sit down all day and make it look so easy?How do they live inside their skin and make it look so easy? Why does Ginny hate herself? Why does she look in the mirror and see only fat, fat, fat, fat?
