Really Good, Actually

by Monica Heisey

Having him properly out of the house was a relief, not because things felt better or calmer without him, but because the two weeks between “I am going to move out” and “I have rented a van” were some of the longest and slowest of my life.

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.

He said the outcome of marriage, best case scenario, was one of you finding the other’s corpse. Since women usually outlived their husbands and he took significantly worse care of his body (his words), it would certainly be me finding him and not the other way around. This way, he reasoned, his death—ostensibly one of the worst moments of my life—would be something funny and shared, an inside joke. No one I told about this ever agreed, but I thought it was sweet. It is horrible to be sad in the summer. Google