Thinner

My body is starting to return to the shape it had before, when I was in my early twenties and barely ate just because I was always anxious. It's not good, and it's derailing the goals I had in mind for myself. I was working toward being a fit and sexy warrior, someone who could fight off zombies if it came to that and not get winded after a five-mile run. I was working out five days a week, filling up my lunch breaks with squats and lunges and spinning and yoga and other things I can't stand right now. All of that encouragement being barked at me from a fitness instructor is too overwhelming, and my enthusiasm for it has a brittle feeling, as if all it could take to send me into an emotional tailspin is one criticism. After my near-cry in Pilates, I have not been back to one class. I'm too raw for physical exertion like that and I can tell that people can see it. Something about feeling like your entire emotional landscape is written on your face makes you not want to sweat.

I know when things started to go wrong for Gino, when I began to let him down. It was when I got fat. When we met, I was a sick little puppy, barely eating, only weighing in at 120. Healthy for me is 130-135. During the last year of our marriage, I fluctuated, reaching 164 at my highest. I was always good about portion control, but what I have never been good at is resisting. I chose my food with abandon, I realized, because I thought that even if I was so fat he couldn't find my vagina, he would still love me. I realized quickly that I had assumed wrong. He started to tease me about my weight soon after I knew how far I had let myself go and suggested that I work out more, when I was working out on my lunch break every day. I could barely keep up. I was cooking two meals every night- what he wanted, since he never gained weight, and then what I could have, since weight was clinging to me like fossilized moss. If I told him I was too tired and only wanted to cook for myself, he would eat nothing and seeth over it. Still, we started boxing together on Friday afternoons in a further effort to get me fit, and I tried and tried again to get him to go to yoga or running with me. I tried to look at it as an optimist would- he was trying to get me in fighting shape in case I ever needed to defend myself. It was not about his desire for me, or his lack thereof. He was only looking out for my safety, I told myself, and I loved being around him so much that I could ignore the sting that came with being insulted for being overweight.

In the beginning I assumed, like an idiot, that Gino would continue to love me no matter what happened, how much I aged or gained weight, or how my body changed to accommodate the children we most certainly were going to have. A love like ours was rare, so rare that it did not even exist as I thought it did, I realize now. I had made these assumptions foolishly, measuring his love against my own because I had no other stick to measure with, and I never lost that feeling I got when I saw him. That bubbles in your spine, first opening beats of Super Bass feeling, that made the sun shine a little more brilliantly because it was reflecting off of him. The thing I hated the most was how dingy those feelings have become in hindsight. My love for him seemed like walking straight off a cliff because I was too distracted to notice that the ground was about to disappear. This feels like grade school, realizing that the popular girls are saying horrible things about me behind my back. The factor that makes this so much worse, however, was that I have no idea how long this betrayal has been going on, or how many people he has been sharing these feelings of his with. It is worse than cheating. If he had cheated, I could have understood it. Physical urges are chemical, they come and go, and are usually regretted after the fact. His talking to other people, a number of women probably being in their numbers, about how I had disappointed him as a spouse makes me want to bury my head in sand. It makes me think of the ice cream.

A few months before we split up, in March, he came home from work one night and when I asked him what his day was like, he told me he had gone out for ice cream with one of the girls who worked in the Laundry department. I was so annoyed by this, my ears blazed red and I was speechless. I was jealous and hurt, not because I perceived this as cheating, but because he had done something I was always asking him to do, and he had done it for someone else. He cared more about her feelings, I thought, than he did about mine. -You went out for ice cream with her, I said, -You might as well have just fucked her, because this feels worse.

He didn't understand. He never understood, and now he never has to. In the end, I made him promise to take me out for a movie and then go with me for ice cream. We went to see the Hunger Games together, on the day before his 31st birthday, but he still didn't want to go for ice cream after because it was, in his words, "too cold for ice cream". I let it go. We had dinner out for his birthday the following night, at his favorite restaurant, a Peruvian place. He liked it there because all of his friends ate there and the waiter was another friend of his. I wished him a happy birthday, we held hands across the table, and drank a bottle of red wine with our beef heart skewers and fried seafood. I made him stop at Ben and Jerry's so I could buy myself an ice cream cone. The following week was my birthday, celebrated at Najwa and Gabe's house with some friends. I wore a dress I had picked out as my gift. Gino spent the whole night playing caroms, a strange game that involves flicking a tiny disc across a board to move other tiny disks. I have one picture of us standing together that night. Gino's face fills up the frame, and he looks as if he is covering up a wince with a reluctant smile. Only the lower half of my face is visible, my mouth open and smiling behind his. I looked at this picture later, and I realized that this was the last picture anyone would ever take of us together. He looks handsome, but strained, as if being present for his wife's birthday is more than he can take. I just look happy to be near him.

The irony of this is that now I am getting back the shape I used to have, the body that first caught Gino's attention, but it is the misery of being alone that is allowing me to attain it again. This need to control how much I eat is my bad habit, along with smoking, that I had given up while I was happy but now need again. I ran into a former friend at a party recently, who knew nothing of my recent trials and said, -I see you haven't gotten fat, so, no kids?

I smirked at his dumb little face and answered back, -I'm the thinnest I've been in years.

Why I am the thinnest I've been in years is none of his business.