It was Day Thirteen of my juice cleanse. I was at work getting ready to teach a four o’clock yoga class when I snapped. I wasn’t accustomed to not eating actual food and honestly I hadn’t planned on starving longer than three days, but Day Three came to an end and I got all ‘Thelma’ and suggested to Louise in the mirror, “Let’s keep going.”
“Are you sure?” Susan Sarandon asked staring back at me. I nodded and glanced around my bedroom for a dingy cowboy hat to throw in the air. It took a minute to remember I wasn’t about to plummet to my death in a convertible.
I’m not a health nut by any means. Sure I teach yoga, but I have food issues. Mainly, cake issues. Used to be I’d have to wait for an office party and pretend that I was excited to gather ‘round and sing happy birthday to whoever was turning twenty-seven this time (Wow! Astounding achievement!) just so I could jockey my way to a corner piece of cake.
Not anymore. Now with the amazing advancements in junk-food packaging I can purchase single-serve pieces of birthday cake on the regular. I can buy two or three or seven slices a week and feel like it’s an entirely reasonable thing to do. A few weeks ago though, I slid three perfectly-sprinkled slices onto the conveyor belt at Ralph’s along with a small head of broccoli and some lemons. As the clerk scanned the third piece, he glanced up and caught my eye for what felt like an eternity. I panicked.
“It’s for my cat,” I mumbled and pretended to search for a non-existent reusable bag in my pocketbook. I wasn’t fooling anybody. No bags, no cat.
A week later my first shipment of pre-packaged juices arrived. Around Day Six, I started to feel guilty about the plastic bottles overflowing in my recycling bin, and the dying oceans and the fish choking on microscopic pieces of plastic but on the other hand, my abs were starting to show.
But I digress. At work that day, I was searching for my misplaced bottle of beet juice when I felt my boss’s corgi panting and dribbling on my ankle. Instinctively, I jerked my foot out of the line of spittle and I accidentally kicked little Corky clear across the lobby where he landed on a pile of sweaty yoga mats. For a second I stood and marveled at the sheer power of my newly-slender legs.
(And yes, my boss Amber named her corgi, “Corky.” That’s how she is. She also changed her own last name to “Glow,” apparently without recognizing that she sounds like an out-of-business tanning salon.)
Amber slammed down her cup of oolong tea, gathered Corky in her arms, cooed something unintelligible into his ear, spun around to me and shouted, “Meet me in the meditation room! Now!” Then she stomped down the hall. Not very yoga-like, if you ask me.
I turned to my co-worker, Ross, who had been pretending to organize yoga blocks into symmetrical stacks, and whispered, “Imma stab a bitch.”
“Honey, be careful — you know you haven’t used a knife in weeks.”
He was right. He also knew that back on Day Ten, I had texted Marcus (my psycho ex) and said, “Hey babe (kissy-face emoji) im sorry i told everyone at the food co-op that u still eat mcdonalds and u have a micro penis (eggplant emoji) wanna hang??”
When he texted back, “Who dis,” a few hours later, I realized I may have had one too many (juices).
Ross knew I was teetering on the edge. Worried about what might happen next, he followed me down the hall toward Amber and Corky.
I, on the other hand, was a superhero trapped in a dank hot yoga studio. I was magical, elusive, destined for greatness. I was a unicorn — no, I was a drop of morning dew on a lotus flower on the back of a unicorn. I was Miss Universe and the whole mother-effing universe at the same time. I was light itself and my own goddamn savior and I was definitely blacked out at this point.
The rest of the story I only know because Ross told me the next day at Starbucks. Allegedly, I pointed at Corky, stumbled a bit, and slurred something along the lines of, “My third eye sees that I am far above this menial drivel,” and then either, “I am the walrus,” or “I need walnuts.”
Looking back now from the vantage point of this In-N-Out drive-thru line, I feel pretty good. Sure I’m unemployed, but I live in California and in thirty minutes or so I’ll be eating a double-double, not to mention my jeans fit great.
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