how to fall in love in los angeles pt. 2
There is that stupid old joke about people in LA not eating, especially the hot people, which could be disproved by standing outside of Zebulon by the taco stand on any Friday night. I used to not eat in LA. I used to take a Klonopin every morning that they told me to take so that I would make myself eat and then I’d just feel better about not eating. I used to walk to rehab everyday instead of taking the bus and I’d pass the army of tents near the VA center on my way to the high rise building where I’d have to meet whatever grotesque fate they had cooked up for breakfast on floor 2. One morning when I came into the lobby slightly sweaty and already visibly upset about the idea of measuring the forced dose of 2 cups of sugary cereal into the ugly plastic bowls they had up there I saw Henry Winkler leaving physical therapy. I didn’t know it was Henry Winkler, I just knew he looked familiar and then I spent all of breakfast trying to describe him to the other girls and none of us could think of his name. We weren’t allowed phones so that we could better contemplate our digestion. The investigation into who Henry Winkler was took up a lot of our attention and a few of us didn’t finish our meals. When we didn’t finish our meals they used to make us drink shots of protein shakes and sometimes they would be out of the chocolate flavor and you had to drink vanilla and whenever that happened I always had a worse day than usual.
One time we tried to draw a map of the United States from memory and none of us could remember where Idaho was. This made our nutritionist comment about the importance of potatoes and any cheer in the room sort of dried up pretty quickly after that.
There is a hierarchy to eating disorders that you’re not supposed to talk about but unfortunately obviously exists. There was one bulimic girl in my group who never seemed to have anything good to say.
One day they asked us why we think we don’t eat, which to me is a question that the therapists there are paid far too much money to be asking.
Having an eating disorder has almost nothing to do with wanting to be skinny and everything to do with wanting to be obsessed with something that seems easier than the thing you’re really scared of and were obsessed with first.
There is also the payoff of feeling so empty and so beautiful for being so empty. The thinnest I ever was was the closest I ever felt to god, who is conveniently the exact opposite of the thing I was running away from.
Once I was in recovery and on my way to my next addiction, my ex-boyfriend would cook me breakfast every morning and put a little pile of vitamins on my plate which I soon discovered were a nonnegotiable part of the breakfast. My stomach was and seemingly always will be permanently fucked up from my stint at starvation so whenever I take vitamins I feel really nauseous. I don’t know if this is subconscious or real or what but it doesn’t really matter it’s all the same result which is that no matter how hard he tried to get me to take them I knew if I did I would end up on the bathroom floor.
Instead of fighting with him about it, I would throw them over the balcony when he wasn’t looking.
I threw them instead of trying to convince him that I couldn’t take them because I had never once won an argument with him and because having breakfast with him out there was my favorite part of the day and I didn’t want to do anything to ruin it. If you walk around the houses off of Rose on Venice or off of Sunset in Echo Park on a sunny weekend morning, you will almost always see couples eating breakfast outside. If you’re ever lucky enough to be one of them you should hope you’re also lucky enough to think of how perfect you look on the outside in that perfect moment where you forget where it’s all heading. He would always get up first, or go take a phone call, and I would sit there alone trying to will the moment to return.
There is something verging on the spiritual in the morning routine of a couple in love in Los Angeles. You will want to hate them if you see them.
On certain mornings on that balcony eating breakfast with him, I felt so light that I felt nearly as beautiful as I did when I was empty.
Obsession is a desire so strong it breaks down your will and your personality, you are all submission and all liquid and all his all the time. The only difference between anorexia and love is that in love there is someone other than yourself who can hurt you. You realize there’s a chance the other person could recover, and once you realize that the panic will color everything but those perfect mornings before the fear has a chance to set in. But you will stay until you disappear, become all submission and all liquid, all need all the time. And when there’s nothing left of you but the bad parts, one of you will leave, and then you’ll rebuild your will day by day, then you’ll chain yourself back from putting the figurative needle in your arm, then you’ll suffer your way through the transition back to yourself, and then you will still feel the hunger, in some tiny part of you that was still too weak to build on and that you built on anyways out of desperation, in that tiny part you still belong to them. You will still need them.
And so you need someone and you go on until you need someone else but you don’t stop needing the last person either.
And that’s just the shitty part of being human. You need something forever and you’re aware of it and you can’t do anything about it but try to need something that doesn't have a chance of leaving you.
When I do eat breakfast now I usually eat it outside. My cat screams to be let out so she can look at the city too. Cole sometimes gives in to this and brings her out on his lap or carries her around to sniff the flowers. Nobody can see us because we’re in his backyard in the Valley but if someone in one of the big houses in the canyon decided to get really big binoculars, they would get a glimpse of our little paradise.
