I am a reckless optimist. That is what I say to people when they ask me how I get by, about how I am feeling. So much of my life has felt like a game of roulette; most of the time it lands on even when I always bet on odd. But I’ve always liked playing the game, always happy to throw the marble and watch it spin. Never really believing in a jackpot, but keeping a little ember of hope lit in the corner of my heart that it might happen. Happy to be there, happy to play.
The marble finally landed on odd, but it did not feel like a jackpot. It felt like I lost. I wondered if the game was over, and if all that time playing was worth it.
***
Yesterday I woke up alone and I did not have an appetite and I always have an appetite. I’ve crawled through the ramshackle ruins of the worst parts of my life, the shelves of my mind tumbling forward and burying me in its debris — and even then I’ve had an appetite. I’ve chewed on toast when my stepmother wanted to kill me and I’ve steamed rice when my father wanted to kill me and I rolled an omelet when the government wanted to kill me and I’ve dumped a pile of chips into a tub of hummus when I wanted to kill me. I’ve always put something in my body so the version of me in the future would at least not have to be both sad and hungry. Eating something in the pits of these dark moments, in the pits of depression, and despair, and rational fucking fear, felt like a little prayer. It was like proof that I was going to keep going, that I would need something in my body to keep from keeling over.
***
Today I sat in bed before the sun rose and the molecules of my mortal coil jittered, shaken and ungrounded, my body reaching out for something. My body wanted to eat, and my heart could not will itself up to do anything about it. It felt like that ember had, perhaps gone out. I wondered if the optimism was finally squashed, that ember of wonder and hope that my ancestors carried and protected and passed down to me after generations of protecting it against the cold and cruel winds of the world. Was this it? Had I let the fire go out? I sat in the bathtub, letting the water dry off my body as the sky turned from black to blue and again I felt hungry and I had no appetite. My aching heart looked in my cupboards and into my fridge, threadbare but enough to make something. The gnawing pain in my gut and the increasingly hollow feeling in my head took over, desperate for something to latch onto, desperate for sustenance, desperate to survive. I stood in my kitchen and I fried a hashbrown and I chopped it up with carrots and cilantro and old purple rice — a week-old, half-full takeout container of purple rice that has been waiting resolutely in my fridge to be eaten — and still I had no appetite. I fried and then steamed an egg and placed it on top and it was beautiful and I cried tears of grief as I ate. It was the longest meal I’d forced myself through in a while. The meal was enough to quiet the noise in my skin, to warm the spiky chill in my brain.
Tomorrow I will find out if I am still so reckless.