At the beginning of the summer, I met with a bunch of friends from high school who I hadn’t seen in about a year. It was a going-away party for one of them, Dean. He was enlisting in the army and left the following morning, and we drank in his honor because he had to pass a urinalysis and couldn’t, and also because, when someone is leaving, you drink for them. Tea if you must. Whisky if you can. We drank coconut rum because it’s what we had, and we pulled out his hookah and smoked the blueberry shisha he kept in his bookshelf for two hours or so. I tried to explain to everyone there that no, an entire bottle of coconut rum was actually not enough to get me drunk, and that I didn’t want to take everyone else’s share just so we could try.
At some point, we stopped talking about our colleges and started talking about our high school. About the library we practically lived in, about the cafeteria’s enormous soft pretzels and fantastic jalapeno cheese, about our conquests and thoughts and friendships. About everything.
Frozone– so named because of his desire to be Samuel L. Jackson and our shared obsession with The Incredibles– talked about his ex-girlfriend, his ex-fiance, and their breakup. He told me he always thought that he and I would have sex, and I stared at him, baffled but flattered, because to think about our friendship and the way I chose my fuck buddies, it wasn’t unlikely that, had he never had a fiance, we would indeed have had sex. But then, he didn’t know about my fuck buddies, and I never got to a point of ever being sexually interested in him, so I guess Jezebel really does have a point.
Later, I mention that I gained twenty-five pounds in my first year of college, and everyone stares at me, baffled. “Where did it all go?” Dean asks. The only other girl in the room, Dean’s girlfriend, quickly speaks up. This is the first time we’ve met, but we became quickly acquainted and soon bonded over our shared dreams of the zombie apocalypse. “Don’t even worry about weight,” she says. “You look great.”
Suddenly, I realize that she thinks I think I’m grotesquely overweight, sexless, unlovable. Considering the way every other girl I know reacts to any sort of weight gain, this makes sense, but I immediately clarify. “I don’t care about how I look because of the weight. I like the way I look, I like the way my clothes fit now, just a bit tighter with just a bit more cleavage. I’m grumpy because I gained this weight without thinking about it, because the fat makes it uncomfortable to wear tight clothing even if it does look good on me. I’m grumpy because I plan on losing it and I don’t want to get embroiled in diet culture or food-hating or sugar substitutes and skim milk in decaf coffee for the rest of my life. But I’m losing it because I want to be physically more comfortable with myself in the heat, not because I think there’s something wrong with me, and I’m going to refuse to hate my body or even think mean things about it no matter what size I am.”
She smiled and nodded her head, surprised but reassured by my reaction, not quite sure how to deal with someone who didn’t hate their weight. Her smile seemed a little knowing, though, like maybe she had tried to love herself, too, like maybe everyone does at some point but that the world makes it impossible. But fuck it, I’m going to do it, anyway. There is no try. There is only do.
Courting the New Century 