The Green Poison
It is 1 a.m. All of his stuff is gone now. I am not angry. I am not sad. It feels like something familiar. Being all by myself. Disappointed by someone who I foolishly thought would never betray my trust. After making a couple of phone calls to my dearest friends, making sure they are aware of the very last detail of my breakup, I dial one last time. As I am waiting for Lucy, one of my best friends who at the time was based in Amsterdam, to answer, I reach for an unopened box of 40 pistachio biscuits placed on the left corner of my beige kitchen shelves.
As I repeat the same story I have been telling for the past two hours, I cannot help but continue stuffing myself with the green bites richly sprinkled with sugar. I walk around the corners of an apartment that I no longer recognise. Hours earlier, John’s laptop was carefully placed on the coffee table, his toothbrush was leaning towards mine in the bathroom, and his clothes took up far more space in the wardrobes than mine ever did.
It is around 3 a.m. His traces have been officially erased. And all that I am left with is nothing but three dozens of green cookies, the phone and myself.
“How are you even so calm?” Lucy asks me. She fails to comprehend how a person goes from “I want to spend the rest of my life with this man” to “The second I learned what had been going on, I asked him to move out,”. To be completely honest, I couldn’t either. With each sweet bite follows a bitter conclusion about the pettiness of my reality. Contrary, I feel nothing but proud of myself. Proud for handling what any woman would call extremely embarrassing, with zero tears and a lot of dignity. “But is the tearless state I am currently finding myself in, an equivalent of strength and a sign that I am, in fact, keeping it together? Could there be any dignity in the complete failure?” I thought as I reached to grab the next pistachio biscuit.
“You should start taking care of your body,” is a phrase my mom liked to use at least three times a week while I was dating Joey, yet another unsuccessful relationship I put myself through a couple of years ago. That was the first time when the signs of what people would describe as an eating disorder started showing up. I was constantly reminded by my then-boyfriend that I should be careful with what I am eating because my “metabolism wasn’t always gonna be the same,”. I was regularly asked by him whether I really needed to eat the dessert I was craving. Or compared to how other females looked like. Despite my fight against it, these remarks settled permanently in my mind and only dared to speak up when I was in the company of a mirror. In March, I finally gathered the courage to break up with Joey over dinner. I carefully made the case for my mental and physical misery as he slowly cut into his rib-eye steak. I watched him swallow the bites as if in slow motion. Shortly after, I left. And I had never felt more fed.
A month before I met John, Lucy and I decided to spend our days on the seaside where my family owns an estate. We were both single and enjoying our lives because we both knew that sooner or later, one of us was going to meet someone, and the way we were living our lives would never be the same. Our routine was pretty simple. We got up around noon, went to the beach, sunbathed, had cocktails and ate tasty seafood. These moments remain vivid in my memories mainly because this is the time I felt healthy and good in the physical package known as “body”. After months of purposely starving myself, I had finally started eating regularly and had stopped struggling with my weight.
When I first met John, I was certain I had met my soulmate, the missing piece, my one true love. In the beginning, we had one of these relationships everybody dreamed of. And we were not afraid to show how we felt for each other. The first time we were apart after we started dating, I went to Milan with Lucy. I spent the whole time talking on the phone with him, which undoubtedly was irritating to my companionship. My room was on the tenth floor overlooking the entire city. The night before I was flying back to Sofia, I was once again on the phone with him, smoking a cigarette on the terrace. I was overlooking the flashing lights of the fashion capital when he asked me to shout, “John is my one true love”. It seemed silly. It is silly. But I did anyways.
As time went by, he continued to ask of me. And I continued to give. Despite the ridiculousness of his requests. Until I found myself in a place where I, once again, stopped caring for myself and started putting someone else before me. During one of our trips to Paris, I spent an entire day on nothing besides a cup of coffee. I failed to realise it until my mom asked me the most motherly question that exists “What did you eat today?”. The more our relationship was degreasing, the less I was eating. I subconsciously refused to feed myself because my emotional needs were once again not filled.
It is almost 5 a.m. All that is left from the pistachio biscuits are barely noticeable viridian crumbs. Lucy and I agree it is time to go to bed and figure out the rest tomorrow. Once again, I am all by myself. I try to fall asleep. I should feel tired. I should feel something. Anything. I should at least shed a tear. After what feels like an eternity of lying awake in the bed, I decide to go to the bathroom. I look at the missing black towel and the no longer present dark blue toothbrush. I take a look at the half-empty drawers. I kneel on the cold bathroom floor tiles while holding my hair with one hand and pressing the fingers tips of the other inside my throat. And there it is. The green poison I have been feeding myself with in the past. And the tears.
Alexandra Djurdjevic is a Journalism and Mass Communication student at the American University in Bulgaria. She no longer eats pistachio biscuits.
