Scrupulous

Someone was cooking food in the apartment building. They were either ventilating too much or too little, she couldn't remember what the supervisor had told her caused the problem, all she knew was that she could smell food--a vague in specificity, but definitely meaty type of food. God fucking fuckers. What the fuck was this? She glanced out her window. She didn't see anyone barbecuing across the street in the open park. Why would they? It was winter. Either way her window was closed. She was keeping her apartment as hot as possible and didn't want any heat escaping into her surroundings.

She poured another glass of Chardonnay from the box she had bought two days ago. The entire thing contained 3,135 calories, give or take about two hundred Calories because she had heard from public radio that the FDA did a piss poor job of making sure commercial food items contained the number of calories they said they did and this wine was imported, so it was even more untrustworthy. She felt guilty for finishing it in seven days, because she was going to finish it in seven days. That was what? Four hundred calories a day? That was atrocious. A little past a quarter of the way through now, so if she tried to let it last just a little longer she'd be able to think she was only consuming eight hundred calories a day, but any way she thought about it, it was an excessive lifestyle.

She had stopped writing down what she ate in a little journal she kept by her bed because she found the zeroes adding together made for a very depressing spreadsheet.

So she kept track in her mind. Her mind. It was plagued by cloudiness and dizzy spells. Her mind. She had about two or three hours of relative clarity when she woke up in the morning so she spent that time finishing school work. She spent the rest of her day slowly drinking Chardonnay because for some reason she was less hungry when she was drunk--the only good thing God had granted her.

Still, two days ago, two days ago was the worst. Two days ago was Tuesday, when she had a night seminar who's sole defining characteristic in its otherwise mundane course description was the lovely instatement of mandatory attendance. Because she had to leave her apartment on Tuesday, she often did all her shopping on that day. Sometimes Tuesdays were beautiful days and she revelled in the noise of the small city and in the presumed attention of other people, of complete strangers. She spent thirty minutes picking out an outfit and thinking about how she would do her hair. It used to be longer. Now she had less options and for some reason fewer options took more time to curate.

But sometimes Tuesdays sucked and she just wanted to get everything over with as quickly as possible but found herself unable to do anything at all. Take for example two days ago, two days ago being the worst Tuesday yet of this year--all forty-six of them. She had no yogurt in her fridge. She had eaten it all. Evidently. So she had to buy more yogurt. But she had to go to the registrar in the morning to hand in her second term paperwork. So she made a decision to go to a cafeteria in one of the student centers for her yogurt breakfast.

Their selection was meek and unadventurous. They stocked light yogurt in two flavors: vanilla and peach. Two flavors was romantic at best. No. Not romantic. The other type of ancient civilization turned adjective: spartan. Spartan at best and making her even more upset that today was a Tuesday. Vanilla, of course, made her feel like gagging on every bland spoonful. Peach, meanwhile, left an alkalotic taste in her mouth for unbearable hours in which the urge to eat anything else simply to rid herself of the experience was... well, unbearable. She stood in front of the display with other refrigerated delights for uncounted minutes, until she began to shiver from the cold. Shivering was bad, she knew, because it made you hungry, regardless of the fact that it burned calories. So she selected vanilla, and prayed to her unkind God that she wouldn't be vomiting it up somewhere. Because fucking fuckers thought that vomiting in a bathroom was a sure sign you were bulimic, because apparently teenage girls had never had the fucking flu before. Lesson learned. In high school. Besides, vomiting the vanilla yogurt up would only cause her to experience her day similar to the parallel day in which she might have picked peach over vanilla--spending the rest of the day begging herself to eat anything else to evacuate the taste of peach, instead of stomach acid, from her highly selective palate.

While she waited in line she was bumped into not only by the girl with the oversized backpack in front of her, but also by the boy who was reading some sparknotes--so intently he had lost all notice of personal fucking space--behind her. They both looked like first years. She wanted to strangle both of them. She fantasized about it while she looked at her canvas shoes, scuffed by her continuous ungraceful shuffling and drenched in melted snow.

Then she had to wait for the morbidly obese monster standing guard as teller to count out the change broken from a five. With her fat fingers. Counting under her breathe, expelled from jowls held open by cruel gravity. No. No. No. She wanted to start crying. This woman wasn't obese. This woman was probably just overweight. She had a singular censor in her brain that held her back from thinking completely awful things, because, whether or not she remembered, she had once been a kind person. Still, the length of time it took the woman to hand her three dollars and seventy two cents was almost unbearable, only adding to the excruciating anticipation for the moment of opening up the yogurt and consuming it. So why was this person taking up her valuable time? Even though she knew it would take fifteen minutes to eat the damn thing. Slowly. Making sure every plastic spoonful was as small as she could bear to make it. She thanked the woman, the woman then promptly wished her a good day even though the woman's kindness made her want to cry much more. So she ate a bit of the unholy vanilla mush before throwing it out and escaping to a park that was deserted in early winter.  She could sit down there and put her head in her lap and attempt to cry in the most inconspicuous way manageable.

She made it to the registrar literally five minutes before their lunch break. She was in the park that fucking long.

She laughed about it, now thinking about it in the safeness of her apartment, in the comfort of her bed.  How strange it would have seemed to anyone else watching her. Crying in the park. Alone. For a few hours. How strange. And staring at the glass she held in her hand, she felt like laughing even more. The glass held an off white liquid that caught the light from her bedside lamp, concentrating it at a constantly moving nexus buried deep within the wine, a center of light moving every time she raised the glass to her mouth. You are right. She realized that this was not funny at all. So she stopped laughing and chucked the glass to the opposing blank wall.

It seemed to happen in slow motion. The decision to throw it, the actual physical process of throwing something she did not want to break across the room. Even the sound of the glass breaking against the wall seemed to echo along the rest of her room, seeking nooks between furniture to bounce off of, rebounding back to her. She let whatever feelings she might have had of the event wash over her, just like the sound of the glass and the smell of aerated wine at its extreme. She giggled again, this time slower, longer. She wanted to draw it out for as long as possible. She had nothing to throw this time. Then she said, "Good night," to no one in particular. Closing her eyes to fall asleep made her feel like she was falling through her bed, dissolving through it, disappearing from reality into the liminal space that lurks underneath all children's beds. She fell asleep with a facial expression caught between a smile and a growl.

Someone had once told her she was beautiful.