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.
But enforcing my protein bar regime was not as easy as it used to be. I felt like I was moving through the stages of grief. In the morning there was pain, because of the emptiness. It was as though I had expanded the inside of my stomach to a giant stadium and I was dying to fill up the seats. Next came resolve, me feeling like a champion, slogging my way to my lunchtime protein bar, powered by self-hatred. In the afternoon came hunger again, then exhaustion. The hours between each protein bar felt endless. At the gym, I thought I might collapse. At night I lay awake, envisioning vegetables, tomato juice, pickles, salt—anything that wasn’t the sweet, cloying whey of the bars.
After two days, I returned to Subway and let the salad caress me with its vegetables. I walked back to the office slowly in the sunlight and decided that a few things were true. 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. Fear is when you eat your allotted calories for a given time and you find yourself still hungry. Fear is when you no longer trust yourself to stick to your prescribed regimen.
As I approached the front door of the office, I froze. My mother’s car was parked at a meter out front. I knew it instantly: a white Volvo with New Jersey plates. She had driven all the way across the country to come find me.
“Oh no,” I moaned.
But it wasn’t my mother’s car. It belonged to some dude who looked like Jay Leno. He was sitting in the front seat, vaping. The thought occurred to me that my mother had somehow transformed herself into a vaping Jay Leno, or that this dude had stolen her car. I checked the passenger door. My mother’s Volvo had a dent on the passenger door, but this one was dent-free. I felt an urge to knock on the dude’s window anyway, to talk to him, as if having the same car connected them somehow. As if it connected us.
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.
I took a step toward the office, then I looked at Jay Leno one more time. He was on his phone, yelling at someone. He exhaled in frustration, shrouding himself in a massive cloud of vape smoke: a Los Angeles apparition. I reached for the handle of the office door. Then I turned around and headed for Yo!Good instead.