All Just Humans

1

My room is suffocating me. The walls seem too close together. Ever since last summer they've reminded me too much of my room in Virginia. Maybe it's something about the color, or maybe it's the texture. Whatever it is, I can't stand it. Even if Virginia had been good for me, I don't need to remember it. I don't want to. The only perceivable difference in the room here and in the room in Virginia was that these walls have age in them. All the walls in Richmond had been perfect: pristinely blue, perfectly smooth, no dents, no scratches, no holes where I had accidentally thrown something at it. My own walls are far from that. My bed has dug trenches in the paint from sixteen years of shifting whenever I sat down or rolled over in my sleep. On the wall parallel to my bed the paint had been torn off by tape I had used to hang pictures. A handful of holes from nails my dad had hammered into the wall joined them. To my right there was a misshapen part of the wall from when I had punched it last year, and a few feet from that was a dent from when Helen had accidentally thrown a basketball across my room. Living in the exact same room for sixteen years has given my room age. Almost a soul. Living in a room by force for three months gave a room an antiseptic feel. The last thing I want is for my room to start feeling like that one had. Some part of me believes that if I sit on my bed for long enough that feeling will disappear. Unfortunately, that's what I thought about all my other feelings too, and they still haven't left. It seems like I've been sitting on this bed for years trying to deal with those problems. Of course that isn't true. I sat down twenty minutes ago, and haven't done anything except look through my instagram feed.

I'm alone in the house. My dad took my two younger brothers and my younger sister to the movies, I think to see some Disney movie. My older sister is with my older brother trying to help him buy a suit for his wedding as he has no fashion sense and his fiancée is in Paris for the most over the top bachelorette party ever. My mom is at work at her law firm, attempting to save some drug trafficker from life in prison. My mom would probably kill him if she found out that he left me home by myself, but if nobody tells her then it won't be a problem. The two of them have and always have had very different views regarding what they should do about me in the midst of all of this. My mom was the one who called the ambulance the first time she found me passed out on my bathroom floor. My dad was the one who decided that I was going to Virginia. My mom was the one who kept me in the program a little longer than the doctors said I needed to. My dad was the one who hid my meal plan so I couldn't see it, and he was the one who blacked out all the nutrition information with sharpie. My mom is the one who weighs me every week to make sure I'm still working at it, and she's the one who if she sees my weight drop will call my doctor. I love them both, I really do. They've both kept me out of my fair share of trouble. They've done everything right as far as I'm concerned. I'm just the one who keeps screwing them up.

Technically, I can do whatever I want right now. No one is here to stop me except my sister's cat Muffin who wouldn't intervene or even get up if there was a fire surrounding me. We've had him for ten years and I have yet to meet a lazier cat. I could go on my computer which is sitting within arms reach of me and look up the amount of calories in the food I've eaten today. I could go weigh myself again even though I already got weighed today. I could just as easily look up those awful websites that I used to look at religiously. There's things in my bathroom that can tempt me too, but someone is bound to find out if something is up again.

There's also more productive things I can do. I can start writing my final paper for English that's due in three weeks. I can call Helen or Ava and talk to them because I haven't called them in a while. I can do a load of laundry since I feel okay today. I can call Dr. Mullen if I really need to/want to. I can go downstairs and eat a bowl of yogurt with ripe strawberries.