pants cinched at the ankles, dark green tank top beneath a brown lace dress,
killer pumps with corset details on the vamp. The pumps are high enough to
induce acrophobia. My denim jacket barely keeps me warm, but that’s not its
fault. I’m sure it would be warm enough for normal people with functioning fat
deposits. I have fat, but it doesn’t seem to work. Even when I was bigger, I
still borrowed jackets from people in the office to wear on top of the one I was
already wearing.
So that is probably one
reason I am not myself today – I can’t keep myself warm, and my blood is moving
slowly, sluggishly, like an old creaky donkey, like a drunkard waiting to
die.
There is another reason, and I have
been trying to come to grips with it since last night. I thought I had, but it
seems I have yet to succeed; otherwise I would not have spent three hours coming
up with just one headline. I am realizing, with resignation and a
quietly-building horror, just how impossible it is for me to end up with someone
who will be a partner, in love and in building a life. Of course I will
eventually accept this situation, fully and without recrimination, because
that’s the way I’m built. If I’m really smart about it, it should take me only a
couple of days before I run back into the warm arms of perpetual solitude, the
ultimate consoler, the way contemplative nuns and ascetics on hunger strikes do.
I want to erase the hastiness of this
body, the foolishness of its constituent chemicals. Failing that, I just want to
be warm.