The carols are playing on loop in my head, but I do not mind. It is nearly Christmas in a year I did not think would end. It is nearly Christmas and snowing outside, and for once it looks beautiful. It is nearly 7:00 P.M. Matthias’s stomach is grumbling on the couch.
He is half naked, half asleep. My eyes trace the contour of his chest. I know every crevice, every ridge, every freckle by heart. I spent the last six months rediscovering them. Rediscovering me and how my head fit under his chin, my ear over his heart. I can see it, just barely, pulsing from where I sit.
Six months since I last slept alone in Patient Bedroom Number 5 of a peach-pink house on 17 Swann Street. I have not been back. I am far from cured; it has been long and difficult. Eight A.M. to six P.M., every day. But every night I have had dinner with Matthias and fallen asleep next to him.
Dinner tonight will be quick and easy: spaghetti with tomatoes, basil, and rosemary, fresh from the pots on the windowsill. Matthias will chop some salad on the side, and there should be some Chianti left. Tufts of snow are floating delicately down Furstenberg Street. I wonder if it is snowing on Swann Street as well.
I think of that house and those girls every day. At 9:10, the morning walk. My heart breaks at morning rain, because it means they must stay indoors. At twelve thirty they sit down to lunch. I sit down to lunch too. I am scared with them and breathe with relief when, at one fifteen, it is done. Then they have apple cinnamon tea. I have ginger sometimes. I think of them most of all at dusk. I miss them terribly.
I did not choose anorexia. I did not choose to starve. But every morning, over and over, I choose to fight it, again.
The spaghetti is ready.
Matthias.
He stirs but his eyelids remain subbornly shut in protest. I go to the couch, kiss each, then his nose. Then his cheeks. And get carried away. Within seconds he is wide awake, fighting me off, kissing me, laughing.
When he finally lets me come up for breath to announce,
Dinner is ready,
the boy I love kisses the girl he married and says:
Dinner can wait.
My name is Anna, and I am the luckiest girl in the world. I am a dancer, a constant daydreamer. I like sparkling wine in the late afternoon, ripe and juicy strawberries in June. Quiet mornings make me happy, dusk makes me blue. Like Whistler, I like gray and foggy cities. I see purple in gray and foggy days. I believe in the rich taste of real vanilla ice cream, melting stickily from a cone.
I believe in love. I am still madly in love, I am still madly loved. I have books to read, places to see, babies to make, birthday cakes to taste. I even have unused birthday wishes to spare.
But now the spaghetti is cold and we are running late.
We sit down to eat. Matthias announces that it tastes good anyway, and that I have sauce on my chin. I laugh through my last slurpy bite. He has seconds.
We do the dishes clumsily. Orchid watered, lights out. Suitcases zipped, we dash out the door. We have a plane to catch. To Paris. Hey, hey.