the habit of being

Dear Diary,

All day I have done nothing. I slept late. I ate nothing but chocolate. I drank nothing but tea. I did not write. I did not leave my apartment. I did not do my work. Twice my lover called me on the phone. Twice I had nothing to say.

I have nothing to say to you either.

* * *

We are apart now. The celibacy between us seems endless. I am withering. I am the crumpled fallen leaves in the street. I practive yoga until I am sweaty and shaking and calm, yet it remains that I have not been touched for a month. Alone, I am starved, and between visits, there is such perversion in my mind. I come up with vague schemes against my body. I remember 117 and my spine sticking out. I would sooner tear off my own breasts, have them devoured by beasts, than see them sit lifeless like this, like lumps of fat, like waste. I disgust of such excess flesh, so seldom loved now. I lust for manipulation. With this distance, we are only voices. My voice suffers just as my body does.

In my empty bed, I dream of turning cartwheels in cemeteries with vivid strobe lighting, with Mozart’s Requiem blasting like heavy metal. I wake up reaching for my pen and yet find no words. All day I am so restless I cannot move. Days go by like this, and I still cannot write, and I feel like a broken thing.

I try to revive myself by dragging out my old journals, by reading things I haven’t read since they were written, searching for days more significant than the one at hand. Immediately, I feel swallowed. I am struck by myself, by desperation of my position. It has more or less always seemed desperate to me. I curl up exhausted around my piles of wreckage. There is so much left untold. So much left to do. So many stories. The sun warms my back, through the window over the bed, and I become even more despondent. I envy cats. I tell myself it’s all hopeless, that I will never emerge from this incapacitating boredom, which is laziness as well. Any amount of work to do seems like too much.

I read another tragic novel. Adultery and arsenic. I tell myself this is not the sort of thing I want. It took so long to stop wanting that. I want my own simple passion, the same one I left in the last city I moved out of.

He calls me Sundays and lists his soccer injuries - twisted ankle, sore hip. I pretend that I am mad at him for compromising his body. I scold him playfully and threaten to beat up the other team. I tell him he is too old for these dangerous activities. He laughs. The tradition pre-dates my move. It is nearly a year old.

I decide I will be a nude model. I take my stomach in my hands. I think I’ll give it over to some stranger to have at me, to expose me. But I do not follow through. I become anxious. I am afraid, anymore, to submit. I am afraid even to walk out into the day. I am silent, and disgusted by that which is louder than I am.

I stay in. I wear the same clothes day after day. The bedside table gathers coffee mugs with soggy tea bags still inside, and empty pudding cups overturned by sticky spoons. A have created this little still life of gothic realism - white pills bought at an illegal online pharmacy, a vibrator with a dead battery, given to me by an ex-boyfriend who couldn’t get the job done.

I tell him I’m going to write about us. That I am going to write something sad and beautiful and have it published. He trusts me enough to say that he is okay with that. But what does he know? And I won’t do it, anyway. I fall asleep alone again, without brushing my teeth. I resolve not to oversleep, to make it to work before the afternoon.

Another week of this, and then he will come and I will stop my life to be with him. And then he will leave again.