I am in the vape shop parking lot.

Of all the vices, this has got to be the most pathetic. I drink, but not like I used to—I read but not like I used to. I watch videos like everybody else—angrily and in quick succession. 

I cry often, now—really whenever possible. I’m writing to you, future. I’m writing to you so that you know I am very afraid.

I’ve never felt uglier. I’ve never felt fatter, though I weigh the same as I have for the past 5 years. Everyone is very thin now, which makes something in me sit up straighter. 

I miss my mom every minute. I don’t know what makes poetry good anymore.

I watched the election results in the Nashville airport and it felt like I was falling from some place very high. I drank coffee then Prosecco, but I promise I don’t drink like I used to. 

I’m in love, future. I want you to know that, too. 

When we first met I drove him to the laundromat. We watched our clothes spin, contort, sag under their own weight. I decided that the rounded out way he spoke was all I ever wanted. 

He pronounces the T in bouquet and buffet and in his accent he breaks my name into pieces,

like my mom did when I was a kid. 

One, and then the other. Like a song, like a meal in the middle of the day.  

His family folds me into their arms and I feel a part of me soften. I try to hold tightly to this.

I see images of children without heads—hands—bodies—families. For a year we’ve been paralyzed, as we always seem to be, sad in the direction of tragedy—completely unwilling to change.

We keep killing each other, future. I don’t know how we get through this—if we even should. We’re poor and we’re sick and I’m very afraid. I wish I knew what you looked like. 

I hope you’re kind. I hope you’ve saved something—someone. I believe that you want to. 

People say you aren’t coming, that we’ve killed you with all the rest. And maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s why when a CEO is killed on the streets of New York I feel something like hope.

Maybe you shouldn’t come. Maybe I’ll stay here, in the laundromat spinning. Falling fast from some place high. Not at all like I used to be. 

Bringing 8 half empty water cups from my bedside table to the kitchen is made easy by the fact that I wait tables. It only takes one trip, and this gives me a tiny pang of pride. My left arm holds 4 cups against my chest, and my right hand pinches the tops of the other 4 like a claw machine delivering a prize to the mouth of my dishwasher. 

I once saw a video of a French waiter carrying about 20 wine glasses in one hand–a huge mound of crisscrossed stems. He was so, fantastically calm–bored really. He could not be less interested in what could have so easily been a giant mess. Different people carry things differently. 

I write about depression a lot. I think, for me, it is almost always present in what I create–it is the lens through which my story is told, and it is the thing against which I feel the most friction. This has been an insecurity of mine for a few reasons, not least of which was that, in my early 20s, I was told that being sad was the hallmark of my personality. That I was, verbatim, a bummer to be around. 

Not, like, super encouraging, right? 

I get angry when I think about this because I actually believe myself to be quite a joyful person. I don’t think that depression and joy are mutually exclusive, and I in fact know that people who struggle with depression have an incredible and unique capacity for joy. 

I have always been good at telling stories–so good that I tell myself thousands a day. Some good, some neutral, some devastating. The trick (and the trouble) is to believe none of them. 

Think of these stories this way–you are sat in front of a screen and made to watch a movie starring you. Every scene shows some way you could be hurt, or could hurt others, and how exactly that pain came to be. No matter what, it’s all your fault. It sounds like a kind of brain-washing torture, right? 

Why would you want to get up, go back outside, and live all of this potential pain? Why would you risk it? For a very long time, and sometimes still, I didn’t. I stayed very still, sitting on my hands, avoiding pain. 

I guess the answer is because none of that actually happened yet. None of it will, or has to happen. Believing that–knowing it–is so, unbelievably difficult. 

I don’t know how much pain I’ll feel tomorrow or next week or next year. I do know, though, that it hasn’t been decided yet.

I wish I could carry 20 wine glasses and not worry about dropping them. Instead, though, I’ll carry 8 from my bedroom to the kitchen and feel a bit better. 

We sat in a restaurant across the street from the Official Trump Store in silence. Here I was on a trip with my boyfriend, an immigrant, and there was this big, neon red sign pointed right at him, saying, “You’re not welcome here!” 

In the window of every souvenir shop in Gatlinburg are photos of Trump’s face–ear in a bandage–the words “American Hero” in some egregious puffy paint just below his chin. 

Next to those are t-shirts sporting Biden, Harris, and a squirrel with the words “Who elected Deez Nuts?” 

Oh, and of course there were the standard pins, postcards, magnets, and confederate flag paraphernalia.

I wanted to leave immediately, and asked him to, but he wanted to stay, “This is America, where are we going to go?”

Downtown Gatlinburg is a genuinely terrifying place. People move like zombies–spending money they don’t have and sending their kids to play mini golf while they drink beer and sample a selection of Fox News flavored cheeses and meats. 

It is all of conservative consumerism condensed into four blocks. It is $5 for water and Trump branded moonshine and hand crafted weapons on every corner. 

Before you call me an elitist asshole, let me tell you that Gatlinburg is other things too. We found out from a server at the bar that Gatlinburg is where hundreds of Ukrainian refugees came to live and work. Gatlinburg is where people who love the mountains–who grew up in the Smokies–make a living.

We found our sanity where it always is–in people working service jobs. 

It has become increasingly obvious to me that when you feed people shit, they’re going to get sick. When you take the poorest part of our country—the South—and feed them Trump, Rippley’s Believe It Or Not, and massive amounts of alcohol, they’re going to become sick, hateful, and resentful. 

All this to say, I don’t blame the people vacationing there, I blame the people and industries with a stake in what Gatlinburg is selling.

Thankfully, we only spent a few hours in downtown Gatlinburg. The rest of the trip we spent stumbling up mountains, hiking several miles of the Appalachian trail, running into bear cubs, and standing under waterfalls. 

Something crazy happens when you spend three days in the woods–you feel really fucking happy. 

Gatlinburg is gorgeous, and the Smokies are ancient and magical. We watched the sunset from the highest peak and stayed to see the stars come out. We were high enough and far enough away that we saw the curves of the Milky Way. 

We stood so long looking up that our necks got sore. 

Despite the conservative, consumerist hell that is downtown Gatlinburg, it was one of the best trips I’ve ever been on. Seeing the Milky Way with someone you love—crying because you’re so, unbelievably happy? Suck it racist assholes—you fucking wish.

For the past four years, it has been easy to segment my life into three, cleanly cut parts: before, during, and after my eating disorder. Unfortunately for me–who thought myself entirely separate from the girl who spent four years in the hospital relearning to feed herself–this was a lovely (and very convenient) lie. 

I’m realizing that there is no severing of the self–no forcing out of internal hurt. No, what happens inside our heads is much more stealthy. 

For me, it was a kind of hierarchical shuffling. See, during the past four years, other things were allowed to become important to me–school, writing, people I love. Because I’d grown more comfortable with food and existing inside a body, I believed myself to be through to the other side. 

I have, during the past four years in recovery, sat in wonder at how my brain functioned during my illness–how it, at the expense of all else, drove me to a singular goal. Be small. Don’t need. My disorder seemed to 23, 24, 25, and 26 year old me, illogical–a state of mind I had outgrown. 

Sitting here now, I realize that is a crock of absolute shit. See, just when you’re sure you’ve left a part of you behind, there she is. Waiting for you. Right where you left her. Hasn’t moved an inch. 

The part of me that seeks safety and sanctity in emptiness? Still there. I see her and I know her and I’m scared. 

Recovery comes with more of a choice than I’d previously believed though, which is cool. When we are faced with the self we thought we’d left behind–the self that drives us to reject our bodies at all cost–we get to make a choice with knowledge we didn’t have last time. 

Starve her out, or invite her in. 

The night Trump was elected, almost eight years ago, I felt something terrifyingly familiar–I had no control over an outcome that would change absolutely everything I knew. I felt this way when I found a lump on my body when I was 16, when my mom cried late into the night when I was 4, when I felt a sharp pain in my chest that I couldn’t explain. 

I developed strategies to deal with this feeling–this lack of control. At 8 years old I started quietly saying phrases over and over again–tapping places on the wall of my bedroom–washing and rewashing my hands. Every night before bed, I repeated words in my head until they burned through to my scalp, until I felt I had gained a kind of control. 

I did not know how to hold this fear inside my body. I couldn’t do anything to save myself or the people I loved from the chaos that I felt. I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t blow it out, couldn’t extinguish the fact that we were all vulnerable to pain and loss and fear.

I could not live knowing this, so I made up rules to make it go away.

I found out later this was OCD. I was not told this was normal–was not diagnosed–until I was 18 years old. Until then, I was alone with the white hot words inside my head. Alone with the belief that I had to control everything around me in order to survive. 

The night Trump was elected, I felt this same fear grab me by the throat, heard it tell me I’d better hold on to something because holy fuck this was going to be bad. 

The thing I held on to (and eventually discarded) was my body.

The upcoming election that the media is attempting to shove down our throats in place of what is actually important, has brought her back–has plopped her down right in front of me–that girl who seeks control above all else.  

I have no control over my government funding genocide. I have no control over whether or not we decide to let democracy fall while we do nothing. I have no control over my own fucking uterus in this state. I want to destroy myself because of it–want to control my body because it is all that I have without having to buy it. 

I won’t though–and here’s the knowledge I didn’t have before: I have even less control without a body. Insignificant and vulnerable and selfish as she may be, I need her to carry me forward. To do something–anything. 

I have to choose to give up control so that I have a body that carries my voice forward. 

I’m not going to lie to you it is so fucking hard.

Do it anyway.

I love you.

To the person who, years ago, brought three boiled artichokes in a tupperware to a house party and shared them with me, I think about you. 

To the phlebotomist who makes horror movies with his wife, and described them in detail while taking my blood, I think about you. 

To the girl one year younger than me who, in high school, was the first person to call me pretty and mean it, I think about you. 

To the curly haired coffee shop customer I gave free coffee to, I think about you.

To the vet tech who whispered to me, “I prefer cats too” out of earshot of the vet, I think about you.

To you, who I love, still. I think about you.  

Here’s a poem for all those people I think about. I’ve missed you terribly. 

–

–

–

I thought I saw you at the grocery store but it wasn’t you 

–

I was picking a brand of cottage cheese. I couldn’t

remember if you liked it or not–hardly anyone does.

I assumed you did because you were like me

in all the ways I did not expect. 

I thought I saw you at the grocery store.

You walked just like that, all in the shoulders, gentle

and particular. I wanted to follow you

down the aisles, but it wasn’t you. I wanted

to show you what I had chosen to eat

for the next two weeks but it wasn’t you. 

I wanted to hold your hand, move sliding doors,

go home. but it wasn’t you. 

I always loved how you looked standing

in doorways. 

Nothing I write about you is enough.

I wish I could tell you that. 

I wish I could tell you that the space between the words

is too big. That I’m falling through. 

–

I went to the store with my mother

lifetimes ago. I held her hand while she 

chose cereal and dish detergent and

taught me to turn fruit over

in my hand. Once, while we shopped, a storm 

blew the power out.

In the dark she called for me–my name. Panicked. 

I wanted to say “I’m here,

where I always am, beside you.”

But it was dark and I was afraid. 

The lights came back on, I’m sure,

though I don’t remember when 

or how. I don’t remember leaving, 

just waiting in the dark for something to change. 

I thought I saw you in the grocery store.
It wasn’t you.

–

–

A

I am obsessed with the idea of every man I’ve ever loved—ever been involved with in a significant way—being invited to sit in the same room. Chatting—having conversations with each other about how they know me. How we met. How things ended, or never really began.

I would organize it like a banquet—the kind of thing that smart kids or top athletes went to during high school and college. The kind of ceremony where they would sit beside their families, all dressed in their very best slacks, eating under seasoned chicken and mixed vegetables. 

It would be held in a windowless event space, inside a hotel as bland as blank paper. The chairs would be able to fold and unfold, able to accommodate those who arrived late—who had been added at the last moment. 

I imagine them sheepish at first, shuffling their feet and looking up under eyelashes at the men they were meant to sit beside. Some sinister, some sweet, all unsure why they’ve been invited here. 

When they were nearing the end of the second course—a whipped-topping covered sheet cake—my partner would emerge. Tall, curly-haired, bright blue eyes, deep voice, kind, endlessly funny, smart and gentle, he would stand without hesitation. He would then give the commencement speech. 

“Welcome gentlemen.” He would begin before breaking the news.

“By now, you should all know why you’re here.”

He would tell a funny story about the way I forget everything everywhere, how the fact that our cats exist makes me cry, regularly. He would talk about how I watch scary movies through a crack in my fingers.

He would go on to describe the softest parts of me—the skin of my arms, the part of phone call right before the end, my voice in the morning, the moment after hurriedly explaining an idea I’d just had..

He would speak of me gently, with love. The men in attendance would shift uncomfortably, knowing the ways they’d failed to notice or accept these parts of me. 

Just when it seems I had become bitter and angry in the years since I knew them, sending my boyfriend to chastise my exes, my partner would congratulate them for being there. Thank them for coming. Encourage them to talk amongst themselves.  

They would speak to each other in whispers, the bolder ones getting up to leave, but finding no exit. They would resign themselves to getting to know each other—where are you from? What do you do?

After enough meaningful chatting had occurred, I would finally emerge, looking fabulously understated, to hesitant, scattered applause. I would kiss my partner square on the mouth, and begin the award ceremony. 

I would clear my throat and, without preamble or disclaimer, say, “The recipient of the Best Breakup Line Award goes to ‘I’m not a psychiatrist, Allison.’”

Uneasy applause. A sheepish walk by the man in question across the stage.

I would go on.

The recipient of the most egregious cheating award goes to—

Worst insult goes to—

To he who threw up after our first kiss—

Worst driver—

The uneasiness would fade to soft laughter and cautious joy. It was an apologetic act, to accept these awards—to take the certificate from my hand, look me in the eyes, shake my partner’s hand. 

By the end we would be sitting on a clean slate. All of us in a bland room, in a hotel somewhere entirely neutral, stomachs full of sheet cake, forgiven. 

I want my ex boyfriends to be boyfriends. I want them to treat people better. More than anything, I want to forgive them. 

I strongly believe there needs to be a ceremony for that.