Really Good, Actually

by Monica Heisey

because nothing being particularly wrong felt, at the time, like everything was right.

Certainly, you are not supposed to be twenty-eight years old and actively planning a birthday party with the dress code “Jimmy Buffett sluts.”

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.

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.

But I had recovered too well in that area, was annoyingly committed to nourishing myself, and so my soft butt and I stayed fed.

It is horrible to be sad in the summer.

toasted the beginning of my “ho phase,” though my lip started to quiver as our glasses clinked, forcing him to walk it back and remind me that every ho must take things at a pace that works for her.