Jade Sharma - Problems

When Ogden told me it was going to be okay, I believed him, because he was old and knew stuff about life that I didn’t.

After Peter told me he loved me for the first time, I said, “Peter, I am fucking crazy, and I will fuck this up.” And he nodded. Maybe he saw it as a challenge. Maybe he thought, Well, at least this will be interesting . But he kept coming over, and he kept watching me turn from sane person to insane person to sorry child, and then we’d hug, and I was forgiven. And so you had to ask yourself: Who is the crazier one?

Peter and I met when we worked at the same bookstore. Peter’s on-again, off-again girlfriend didn’t show up to the store Christmas party. I played chess with him, and then we went back to my place. We talked on the couch. I went to the bathroom and shaved my pussy and thighs. When I walked back in, he was just standing there. We kissed. His beard itched my face. His pubic hair was wild. He put it in me without a condom. His necklace was swinging as he fucked me, so he flung it onto his back. He said, “What do you want?” He had a cold so he sniffled as he fucked me. There was something sweet about the way he sniffled, like the whole thing already felt normal.

It felt as though Peter had followed me home one day and never left.

Sometimes men are like cabs with their lights on, and you just have to be there to pull them over.

Later he told me I hurt him that night. That he wanted to cuddle and he felt bad because I rolled over and went to sleep. He fell in love with how I didn’t give a shit he was there.

“Don’t move,” he said to me, when I was sitting naked in a chair. “You look like a painting.”

We touched so much it didn’t feel like someone else’s skin.

In the beginning we listened to music and everything was new. Five years later, we watched television and everything felt old.

Peter hated me for not being there, and then he hated me for being there. I had to keep remembering he loved someone who didn’t exist. As soon as he saw who I was, he would get the fuck away from me like any man in his right mind would. Ogden saw me for who I was, all the bad and all the good. He could keep it all in his mind and still want to fuck me.

Excerpt from conversation 12,983, Peter to me: “You live like a homeless person indoors.”

Excerpt from conversation 20,939, Peter to me: “You make me feel like an employee.”

Excerpt from conversation 56,543, Peter to me: “You don’t understand why it makes me feel bad that you asked me not to speak when Benedict Cumberbatch is on television?”

In the beginning, I wanted to put Peter in the right clothes. I wanted to dress him up, take him around, and then bring him home and say, “Now take off your clothes and fuck me.” He wore brown, pleated corduroy pants, shirts with corporate logos, and sad brown shoes that his mother had bought him for Christmas. I put him in dark jeans, cool T-shirts, beaten flannels, and motorcycle boots.

If I divorced him, another woman would get him already fixed up.

After we got married, I encouraged (i.e., nagged) Peter to get a bartending job.

This was what Peter did when I tried to improve his life: he told me to leave him alone. A few days later, he would say that after thinking about it, he had come up with a plan, and his plan was exactly what I had told him to do. I couldn’t say how it was my idea to begin with, or he wouldn’t want to do it anymore.

Peter’s parents were born-again Christians and brought him up in a renovated barn with no heat. For no conceivable reason, his mother didn’t work. The kids were raised on the meager salary of his father, a preacher. His parents took pride in not collecting the welfare or food stamps they were doubtlessly eligible for. He was raised to believe that instead of being sad for what you don’t have, you should be happy having nothing. Nothingness was close to godliness. I was sad for him that they didn’t let him dream.

He saved change so he could buy a brand-new baseball cap. When he brought it home, his father yelled, “Do you know how much food you could have bought?” When Peter told me this story, I said, “Probably not very much.”

It broke my heart to think of this little kid who wanted a dumb baseball cap. Paging Dickens. It broke my heart again that his father had won — that he did break Peter in some fundamental way. Instead of teaching his son not to be brainwashed into thinking having things would ruin your life, he made his son believe he wasn’t good enough to have things. Peter would always think the world was divided between those who were served and those who were servers. That was probably why he drank. Achieving anything was hard enough without someone kicking the dreaming out of you.

I’m not a psychologist, but I could be. It’s not that hard to understand how people got all fucked up.

Peter showed up at an open call and got hired as a bartender on the spot. The guy who interviewed him was gay. Gay guys loved my husband. I used to think Peter was secretly gay and that gay guys could pick up on it, so I kept making jokes about him being gay, and then I tried to finger his ass when I blew him to see how he would react to penetration. He freaked out and told me he really wasn’t gay and to stop trying to finger his ass. He seemed suspiciously angry, so I figured he still might be part gay.

Peter yelled, “I love you,” through the bathroom door and left for work.

I got back in bed and bunched up the blanket and rubbed myself on it, but I must have fallen asleep before I came.

I woke up starving. I tried to love the hunger. I imagined the hunger was like the vibration you felt under your feet on a train. This hunger would lead to perfection: a face of cheekbones, hip bones sticking out, clavicles jutting. Light and empty.

Smart women are supposed to say certain things. You are supposed to say, “I care about being healthy, not skinny.” Or “[Insert female celebrity] looked better when she wasn’t so skinny. When she looked normal.” All women encourage one another to eat. They say, “I’m so jealous of your curves,” as they think, “Yeah, eat more, fatty.” I wanted nothing more than to be rail thin and say, “It’s so annoying. I eat so much and can’t ever gain weight.”

I opened a peach Greek yogurt. I had been subsisting on yogurt for the last seven days. I was tired of eating things with the consistency of baby food. When you are not eating, you are scared of yourself. Scared you will accidentally run out and buy a pizza. It’s important to eat something so the hunger won’t build to the point that you do something crazy, like buy a jar of peanut butter thinking one bite won’t hurt, and then you’re like, fuck it, and eat the whole thing. As soon as I ate a bite of the yogurt, I felt like a failure.

You are living on an average of 120 to 400 calories a day, and 800 calories a day is considered a starvation diet. You feel empty and light. You feel like a winner, above those losers who have to fill their hole three times a day and then complain they are fat. You have plenty of energy with nothing in your belly. It’s terrifying how fast this becomes normal. You can’t eat the peach ooze at the bottom.

The more you want to be free of food, the more obsessed you become with it.

Eating so little makes your taste buds restless. You crave salt, sugar, hot sauce, mustard, pickles. Your tongue wants to come out of retirement and be alive. Weird food combinations. Using a tomato to shovel spicy mustard into your mouth, and in between, a squeeze of honey. You are basically eating garbage.

Sometimes I felt like I was pushing against the day, and it wouldn’t go anywhere. I sat in the chair. Dust particles in the light. I stared into the mirror. I lifted my shirt. I sucked in my stomach and thought, This is how it would look .