If I keep living like I did this week, I'm going to crash. I'm going to be button-eyed rag doll, wasted in my own skin, with the highest highs and lowest lows, slamming myself back and forth between what I want and what I need. I feel like I'm acting on drunken impulses, hand picking my pleasures, only to have the gluttonous weight of my indulgence seize my body again.
And no, not PMS.
It started with food. It always starts with food. It was in no sane person's mind any sort of binge or purge or disorderly consumption of noodles, but it blew me into a swamp, so sticky and sickly, so guilt-ridden in spite of the beautiful, clean weather we finally received. It was cool outside, but I felt hot on skin. I felt like the food was burning into my arms and legs. I wanted to be a Wintergirl. The tall and short, thin and wide, dark and bright - they're all sick with disease. They have their own battles with demons. But at least the thin looked good.
I won't write too much about what I put through my body, but I spent my expected happy hours on Thursday clenching my backpack to my body, waiting for cold sweat to pass, sleeping away a fiery pain that arose in the bottom of my gut. Nothing explosive or wormy happened, if that's what you're afraid I'll describe. But I collapsed in bed, shuddering next to my heat pack, barely stopping myself from drooling, exhausted by wrenching pain inside.
Still. Managed 36 miles this week without running that day, which brings me to mention only briefly that I woke at 10 PM to eat a bowl of fried cabbage and seaweed while working on a hopeless Candy Crush design until 2 in the morning. I slept briefly and woke up to finish it. I refrained from donuts on the last day of YSP. I felt too horrible about sleeping in class to say thank you to Eldin. I ran 8 miles (it wasn't on purpose) on nothing but a couple slices of smoked ham and 4 dried plums. My dad asked me if I was celebrating, but every crying fiber inside of me screamed for a crueler punishment.
There were nights in which I slept wrapped in woolen devastation, feeling supremely alone, knowing God was sad, but being too weak to lift my eyes up (Worn by Tenth Avenue North. Don't tell me you can't feel the tragedy inside). There were the subsequent mornings, spent half-comatose, in which I stared at my drawings bitterly, still wishing for time and less impediment. I stayed red-eyed and ugly until I ran and ran and ate and ate. I didn't sleep enough. And I ran again, on Saturday, for 8 miles.
It was a gripping cold outside, but my previous confident stride was reduced to a meek shuffling. Nothing I had done made sense to me. Professor Sally told us that YSP was supposed to light our fire, but there was only a candle inside of me, and was certainly not for analytic math and not particularly invested in anything. I showed my sister the technicalities of Candy Crush (she's on Level 29 now, bless her) and drove glumly to Sunny's party, where there was an abundance of good chicken and multiple frenzies of hand washing. I fed my dehydrated lips and sat on the top of the corner of the couch, completely comfortable even in unnecessary solitude.
I had to write privately about everything else that happened inside my discomforted heart, especially because I don't have the strength to write it in code now, but I don't think I'm doing any readers any injustice. It was a very secretive sadness, probably more irrational than not when scribbled on the floors of the hotel room at 12 in the morning.
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