Wasted Updated Edition by Marya Hornbacher

Author:Marya Hornbacher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

Fall 1990: We sat on the steps behind Copperfield’s Bookstore & Cafe, and grungy long-haired barefoot baby-hippy boys with pierced nipples played guitar. We smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and drank coffee. I rode in the back of a trundley blue pickup truck from somewhere to somewhere else, watching narrow dirt roads roll by beneath the wheels. Life was good, and I was giddy with freedom. That fall, without noticing, I had stopped planning my life. I became bohemian because I had nothing better to do. I was in limbo, and limbo is nice because no one asks you any questions, and no one wonders where you’re going or where you’ve been, and life is one big dancing bear Grateful Dead sticker on the window of an old Volvo. People speak of karma, and it is very easy, very very easy, to believe all is inevitable, and all you have to do is lean back and watch your life go by.

It’s just life, after all.

But a person like me, a person who needs a project at all times, a cause, cannot go for very long without one. This was, ostensibly, a year for me to kick back a little, loosen my grip on the need to race through my life and get everything done all at once and faster than anyone else, a year for me to “explore” my “psyche,” “reconnect” with my “body,” take “things” a little “slower,” “ease up” on my “self.” This was, I told my parents over the phone and in letters, a time of great “growth” for me, a time of simply “being,” of “health.”

Bullshit. This was, as I perfectly well knew, a stroke of sheer luck, a stellar opportunity for me to ease away from the real world, move deeper and deeper into the eerie childish singsong land in my head.

It started in earnest, I think, in October. I simply did not eat. I was tenacious this time. It was definitively not about “losing weight.” That particular moniker for what I was doing seemed absurd, even to me. That term is external. What I was doing was purely internal. I was trying to starve. I was exploring the extent of hunger. The hunger was the thing, the heady rush. I ate cereal at breakfast and drank water all day. I carried a two-liter bottle around with me everywhere, filling it every hour. Sometimes I drank a little juice at lunch. I remember reading the label on a bottle of carrot juice, drinking one-third of the neon orange contents.

Rebecca and I went to the grocery store together one day in late fall. I was wearing a blue dress. We bought Oreos and dried apples. We ate the Oreos and drank wine in her kitchen that afternoon. She said: I’d never have guessed you used to be anorexic. I replied: Oh, well that’s all over now. I tossed my hair. I ate the Oreos slowly, licked the cream from the middle. I walked home, said hello to the family, to the boyfriend who had come for dinner.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.