Really Good, Actually

by Monica Heisey

we weren’t unhappy, just unsatisfied … until suddenly we were so, so unhappy, and we couldn’t laugh, and we couldn’t have sex, and we couldn’t order Thai food without looking at the other person like, who are you? staring at the stranger we’d chosen at age nineteen

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

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.

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.

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.

Almost nothing had happened to me before we’d known each other. Meeting him had felt like the most significant event in my life, and until a few weeks ago, every year that passed had only reinforced that this was true. Now what? I thought.

I told them I wished I were a widow. ‘I feel like when you get a divorce, everyone’s wondering how you ruined it all, what made you so unbearable to be with. If your husband dies, at least people feel bad for you.’

Having a sexual secret felt kind of fun and soapy, but I was also fairly ashamed of myself. So

being excited or nervous or horny was better than being sad.

But mostly I was thrilled by the messages, at the external validation, the chance to try something I already knew I liked. Meeting new people felt like starting over: daunting and depressing, a challenge for someone fallen on romantic hard times. Reconnecting with paths not taken was easier and seemed more purposeful.

Back at my apartment at four a.m., I’d pass the hall mirror and catch my own eye: a person beguiling enough to be asked out, hot enough to be frenched in the back of an Uber, ‘good on text’ enough to acquire a second and possibly third date.

I was, according to the objective opinion of an outside body, worthy of time, and what was the saying? ‘Time is how you spend your love’? Take