I want to talk about my eating disorder.

I want to talk about it because I'm not ok, and I'm not healthy and it feels like some time, somewhere between sixteen and now, a switch flipped for everyone except me.

When you're sixteen, an eating disorder has a subversive kind of glamor--it's an act of rebellion. It's that teenage-girl way of being independent. These decisions are mine.

But when you're almost twenty-one, it's this shameful thing you carry around all the time, silently. When does this go away? Does it ever? Who is there left to rebel against?

When my stranger asks what's wrong, I don't know how to tell him that I feel like my body has nothing to do with my self anymore. That when I'm high is the only time I feel like a whole person, not trapped. That I don't know how to fix myself.

both hands

This last week has gone by too quickly. I wrote and revised, read pages and pages and Friday night, when I was just having a god-awful night for no good reason, my stranger took me back to his house and gave me a massage and cuddled me until I feel asleep.

Just after Brian died, I started having these nightmares--I was afraid to go to sleep for a week, just because I didn't want to have the dreams. So Darren invited me down to Edinburgh and he watched me sleep, to keep away the nightmares. I don't usually ask for help--not first. I always like to try on my own.

With my stranger, there was a degree of complete surrender I've never felt before. Maybe we say this every time we're in love, but this does feel so radically different from anything that's come before. It's simpler. Even when I'm in such a bad mood I'm picking fights left and right, he can curl himself around me, and all of that anger deflates. The first thing I want to do when I wake up is make him coffee and sit outside smoking hand-rolled cigarettes with his arm around me.

"Saved"
"Ghostfish"
"The Ossuary in Paris"

various, etc

Listening to: Ani
Reading: Gaiman's Stardust; Staffords' Queens, Concubines and Dowagers
Writing: Another story about sad southern men
Cooking: Red-wine pot roast with grilled polenta, brown-sugar shortbread cookies
Recently acquired: A French press, a book on Hebrew, three books of short stories that generally make me feel talentless, a feeling of impending finality, a boyfriend of limitless empathy, a drought of words, an obsession with showering and lotion, and a book of Anglo-Saxon poetry that is surprisingly poignant.
Recently desired: A vintage leather jacket (only 60 quid!), a few more hours, deep dish pizza, new highlighters, a cat, a fish, another cactus (mine is flowering), someone to read me to sleep

fighting through writers' block

portia freaks out, pt 1

I am obsessed with Ryan Adams and strangely flavored cupcakes (lemon-rosemary, banana-ginger). I am totally and completely incapable of coherent thought.
I am also falling more in love with my stranger every day.

stars go blue

When I got on the bus Thursday morning, from Oxford to Heathrow, I thought this was going to be a bad idea, that I was going to get all mired down in memories and writing this paper and wish I was back in Oxford. It's easy to be in Oxford--it's safe. But I'm so glad to have come back.


I'm staying with my academic mother Fran, whose flat is like a home away from home. The door is never locked; people are always coming in and out. May Dip was amazing (what I remember). Fran has this group of friends--it's hard to describe, but it's like this Portia-sized space simply opens up every time I come visit.

My love for Scotland is unabated. It's like the mountains, like this part of me that never relaxes simply eases here. Scotland is wild and raw, cold and wet and dramatic. I spent today in the cafe where I used to study, finishing a paper on Anglo-Saxon kings. I wish I could stay. I wish I had an apartment in St Andrews, spent the weekends seeing plays in Edinburgh and reading in Princes Gardens. More and more, I think I want to live here for a few years, put off teaching, and figure out a way to stay.


I've started making my stranger a mix. I'm not sure though, how to go about it. The last mix, the one I made for Darren right before I left, that was a good-bye mix. My stranger and I have a little over a month left, and I don't know if I should wait, to make a mix for what was, or make one now, for what might be.

I really really like this guy. It's kind of freaking me out. Somehow being sad seems easier, simpler. There's nowhere to fall.