Milk Fed

My mother had never known me either, though it wasn't because I hadn't given her a chance. I'd given her a lot of chances. What was saddest was that she didn't seem to want to know me, not as I was on the inside. I wasn't even sure if she could grasp that I had an inside, that I was real. Sometimes it seemed impossible that she had ever given birth to me at all. Other times, it made perfect sense that I had lived inside her for so long. It explained why she could only see me as an extension of herself.

Oh, my daughter,” I said. “You will forget that I am here. This is the way of human beings, to forget. But you found your way back to me once and so can find your way back again, because I am always here. The world will hurt you again and again. You will hurt yourself again and again. And when it does, and when you do, you will remember me again and again. You will drop to your knees. You will hold yourself. You will be your own daughter again.

in their equation of thinness with goodness, my mother and Ana were so like-minded. My mother persuaded me to stay thin by insulting me. Ana did it by insulting everyone but me. This absence of rejection felt like an embrace.

They say the perfect is the enemy of the good, that if you strive for perfection you will overlook the good. But I did not agree. I didn't like the good. The good was just mediocre. I wanted to go beyond mediocre. I wanted to be exceptional. I did not want to be medium-size. I wanted to be perfect. And by perfect, I meant less.

What I wanted most was for this certified hot person to see a hotness in me, thereby verifying, once and for all, that I was hot. It wasn’t that civilians didn’t find me attractive. But for a licensed hot person to verify me? That was the real shit.

I felt that our kissing could sustain the ritual of women loving women for eons to come.

I thought about how I used to watch my mother sleep sometimes, how innocent she looked with her hands tucked under the pillow. In those moments, I saw her as a little girl, and I felt that nothing was her fault—just a chain of fears and feelings passed down from generation to generation. In those moments I thought, You can show her how to love you better by being loving to her. But it was easier to be loving when the person was asleep.

You will hurt yourself again and again. And when it does, and when you do, you will remember me again and again. You will drop to your knees. You will hold yourself. You will be your own daughter again.

Did anyone genuinely like anything? So much art was bad. I preferred the work of dead people. At least the dead weren't on Twitter

I could never tell if other people genuinely believed their own bullshit or not. I felt genuinely perplexed about it—especially at work lunches, but frequently in my nonlunch life too. At times like this, I longed to break the fourth wall, to whisper, Hey, just between us: Is this a performance or is it really what you believe?

This was the thing about boundaries: they made sense in therapy, but when you tried to implement them in the real world, people had no idea what you were talking about. Or, deep down they knew exactly what you were talking about and immediately set to work reinforcing their case of denial.

You were going to the hardware store for milk again,” said Dr. Mahjoub.

There was a love that had always existed between women. It would continue to exist. We were propagating that love. It was radiating out of my apartment windows, through the city, across the canyons, over the hills, and into the night sky.

Expect nothing. The simplicity of that directive, its bare bones, self-contained power was intoxicating. Expect nothing. It was so clean, so potent. It was a phrase you'd associate with a person who didn't need anything from anyone; a closed system. An automaton. I wanted to be that person. I wanted to be that automaton.

I decided that love is when you have food in your mouth that you know is not going to make you fat. Lust is when you have food in your mouth that is going to make you fat. Fear is the day after you had food in your mouth that is going to make you fat.

What did it mean to love something so much and also be wrong about it? What did it mean to love a version of something that might not really exist—not as you saw it? Did this negate the love? Was the love still real?

But it was better to stay in bed and dream of her than to be together in a realm where we had to pretend that physically we were strangers to each other.

I smelled something roasting, some kind of meat, and immediately thought, Turn around Run. The intimacy of it, the smell of another family’s life, was terrifying.

I imagined googling, How to make a golem fall in love with you. Maybe that’s all that prayer was anyway—a cosmic google. In that case, any iPhone could be a synagogue. I wished I could FaceTime with Rabbi Judah.

There was something nice about being forced to be done with everything by sunset, to be excused from life. It was like a teacher’s note from the ultimate authority.

It seemed that as long as I wasn’t actually having sex with a person, I could get off to them. But once they embraced me it was over.

I thought about how I wanted to take a knife and cut myself out of me. I thought about how I'd been praying for a truck to just hit me. I thought about death and truth and how, in some languages, they were just one letter apart. I wanted to ask her if she knew that.

This interplay between hope and reality was also a part of the mourning.

She had long ago implanted herself in me at the cellular level, spread into my organs⁠—my brain, my heart⁠—until what was hers and what was mine were indistinguishable.

I didn’t like myself enough to suck my own tits.

I had no idea how to be a mom, let alone my own mother. But what about daughterhood? Was it possible that I could be my own daughter? This seemed more doable. I wondered if the universe, in its roundness, somehow already contained my daughterness. Perhaps I'd been being held there, a daughter all along, until I woke up to it. If I could not be my own mother—or at least not the kind of mother worth having—then maybe I could be my own daughter.

I’d entered therapy hoping to alleviate the suffering related to both my food issues and my mother, but without having to make any actual life changes in either area.

All that mattered was what I ate, when I ate, and how I ate it.

My mother persuaded me to stay thin by insulting me. Ana did it by insulting everyone but me. This absence of rejection felt like an embrace.

The heart gets wounded—so what? I thought. I’d seen all the plays. I should have been prepared. Love goes. But what I hadn’t known was how good the love would feel when it was there, like a hymn moving through me all the time.