Days passed, and I haunted the house like a reverse-Havisham, wandering aimlessly from room to room. As I looked around our silent, empty home—half empty, anyway—I realized my husband （“ex-husband”） had paid for the TV and the art on the walls and the kitchen chairs and the thing we put our feet up on when we sat on our appalling couch. Most of the stuff in our apartment was by definition his. Though I’d encouraged him to take everything he’d purchased, he’d left some of it behind, so the place was technically functional but felt wrong: a too-spacious bedroom closet with no shoe storage, a cutlery drawer without any big knives, a kitchen table you could not sit at. I dropped onto the terrible hardness of our couch, set my drink on the floor where our bar cart had been, and sobbed my little eyes out.
I didn’t know where to look, what to think about, or how to spend my time. Every item in the house was dripping with significance. The toaster was a wedding present, so I ate bread at room temperature. The fridge door ephemera—receipts, grocery lists, notes about bananas and eggs and plans to buy a bike lock—was too painful to look at, so I took my coffee without milk. I taped a piece of paper over a framed photo in the bathroom, not quite ready to take it down but not ready to face it yet either. A banner left over from our engagement party glittered on a wall above the space where some of Jon’s art had hung. c o n g r a t u l a t i o n shone in gold calligraphy. The S had fallen off at some point but we’d kept it up, liked it better that way, thought it was kind of fun. Looking at it now was unbelievably depressing.
There were positive discoveries too: without any pressure to blend our two styles, I realized I had disliked almost every decorative item my husband had brought into our home. Anything I’d ever looked at and thought, we’ll have to replace that eventually, had been his—or something we had settled on, defining compromise as “an object we both hate equally.” Now most of these objects were gone. The sparseness of my possessions gave the house a slightly threadbare quality, and I hadn’t kept any of the big towels, but there were no band posters on the walls, no novelty shot glasses in the kitchen, no lightly moldering wooden bath mat he’d gotten high and ordered on eBay. Now there was space to display my little knickknacks, to light the candle Jon thought “smelled weird,” to play the nineties pop music he found boring and generic. Of course, it did not feel better to burn a tobacco and juniper candle and listen to the Backstreet Boys than it had felt to be loved.
Every article and forum I’d found through grim googling （tips for divorce; marriage breakdown young; first time alone how） had told me to prepare for sleeplessness, but I had not realized how long the nights would feel. Another surprise was that I could still stomach food. I’d been led to believe that heartbreak spoiled the appetite. As a teenager I had heavily anticipated the breakup—inevitable, teen soaps about handsome vampires and their underage lovers had taught me—that would leave me unable to eat, wasting beautifully away, so thin and wronged and absolutely thrilled to hell about it. To have had a boyfriend, then lose that boyfriend and several dress sizes, perhaps enough to fit into one of the cursed polo shirts Abercrombie sold in its dank, perfumed mall caves? I could not imagine anything better.
Tragically, I was the victim of a supportive home life, which had led to an alarmingly robust self-esteem, and went to an arts-friendly high school that channeled most of my latent sexual energy into overwrought plays about middle-aged women with oral fixations. And so I did not date, and remained chubby and happy, until roughly twelfth grade, when not having been laid was enough heartbreak to make me lose, rapidly and with no real effort except abstention from solid food and constant monitoring and recording of my caloric intake, fifty-five pounds. Everyone was very happy for me until I fainted in math class after having a popsicle for lunch.
The truth is, if you start your eating disorder even slightly overweight, no one will notice until things are very much at the “what if two meals a day were soup” stage. There was some tutting and discussion about nutrition and balance, then I went to a hypnotist who told me to imagine being beautiful in a bathing suit and I was cured, just kidding. Really what happened was I fell in love and I forgot about it for a bit. These days I was comfortably soft-bodied, the kind of woman people condescendingly referred to as “shapely” or “curvy” or, more often, “confident,” the word practically buckling under its euphemistic load. Sometimes, during periods of stress or after reading too many magazines or listening to a much-thinner friend complain about the size of her legs, I could feel myself tiptoe back toward counting, consuming an egg and thinking: seventy. But, I reasoned, no one has a completely healthy relationship to food and exercise, at least not anybody who came of age during the period when the cover story of every supermarket tabloid was some variation on “This Beach Hag Has Cellulite.” As long as I wasn’t writing out the daily caloric inventories of my teenage years, I considered myself more or less healthy.
However, the temptation in this moment to dust off the ol’ ED—to become one of those heroines in novels whose bones begin to jut concerningly, frightening their friends and rendering them absolutely gorgeous with grief—was strong. “Her big eyes somehow more blue for the dark smudges beneath them, Maggie was too sad to eat, because too many people wanted to have sex with her,” or whatever. I was not about to be the first woman alive to experience emotional devastation without the sudden, dramatic emergence of my collarbones.
But I had recovered too well in that area, was annoyingly committed to nourishing myself, and so my soft butt and I stayed fed. Meals were the only thing that broke up the long, slow hours of that first week without Jon. I worked my way through our cupboards, unearthing long-forgotten curry pastes and the instant noodles we stockpiled “for emergencies.” Every time I tucked into a comforting stir-fry or cut open an oozing homemade quesadilla, I’d imagine David Attenborough’s tranquil narration: even in the darkest times, life . . . goes on. Eventually, I knew, I would run out of food, which was stressful, because I could not imagine leaving the house to acquire more.
Not sleeping was less concerning; no one sleeps well anymore. The world is falling apart, and our phones are just there, glowing in our faces, full of news about what the president has said and which of our exes have recently gotten haircuts. If I really craved rest, I could always drink or take sleeping pills. Jon had told me he was taking them before he left, though I thought maybe this was because the couch was so uncomfortable. He offered me one when he was moving out. I wanted to say yes but felt like it was some kind of statement about How I Was Doing to say no, and so I stayed up most nights watching British murder television on Netflix.
Previously I had found these shows too scary—we （I） lived in a ground floor apartment with very suspect window fixtures, and we （I） slept lightly and frightened easily. Now I found them soothing. There was a pattern to them, a clear hierarchy of right and wrong. Maybe the troubled detective inspector drank too much and cheated on his wife, but he was not a murderer-pedophile living in some kind of pervert’s bunker in Swansea. The murderer-pedophile was always caught eventually, and the beleaguered partner always had to admit the detective inspector was bloody good at his job. It was nice to feel that the difference between guilty and not guilty could be so clear. It was nice to hear David Tennant swearing. Also, a lot of the tension had been drained from these dramas when I realized the murderer is always whoever speaks slowest.