“Shit!” I paced some more. Everything felt wrong. I felt like I was free-falling. All the things that held me together and kept me in place were gone. And I needed to be kept in place. For most of my life I had felt out of control, and it wasn’t until I decided to lose weight that I finally understood the importance of control. The importance of routine and repetition and all the small things that I did every single day that kept me focused and made me feel calm. And now all of that was gone, and I felt like I was falling apart.
Screw that elevator!
This had been the elevator’s fault. If I hadn’t run late for that shoot, I would still be with @TheKyleWhite101. We would be happy and I would still have my car and my followers and I wouldn’t have made such an embarrassing public spectacle of myself, and I would not be here in this dark and dingy room with no bloody internet feeling like I was quickly unraveling. I walked over to the window and flung the curtains and—
“Youuuuuu,” I rasped, dragging the word out as I caught the dark, lurking figure on the opposite side of the road. He was sitting there right by my car, as if he’d been there the whole time—which really made me question my mind. He was looking at my room, waiting and watching like a creepy little stalker. I mustered my courage and walked over to the door. I flung it open, but it hit the wall and then came flying back towards me and hit my arm.
“Crap! Ouch,” I winced and looked down at my arm. A small cut had appeared and it was bleeding. I rushed to the bathroom and ran water over the cut and then dabbed it with some tissue paper. But then, I froze . . .
I turned slowly. He was sitting in my doorway now.
I grabbed onto the bathroom door, ready to slam it if he came rushing towards me. Only he didn’t. He stood up and started wagging his tail. I wondered if this was some kind of ploy to lure me into thinking he was a nice dog. I didn’t trust that tail wag at all. And when he stepped towards me, I slammed the bathroom door shut. I stayed there for at least five minutes before I opened it and peered outside. And when I did, I wasn’t surprised to find him mysteriously disappeared once more.
I went to breakfast at around ten a.m. I’d spent an hour doing my make-up and straightening my hair—I needed to play out at least one of my usual morning routines to make me feel somewhat normal. But, even so, I was feeling anything but normal by the time I dragged myself there. Breakfast was one of those buffet vibes. Sausages, mushy scrambled eggs, bacon and mushrooms—nothing that looked Insta-worthy at all. Usually breakfast for me was a two-hour affair. I would wake up early to make it, usually a smoothie bowl. Do you know how competitive the #smoothiebowl art world is on Instagram? Getting likes takes hours of planning; cutting your fruit into cute heart shapes and placing it together perfectly with edible flowers, sprinkled chai seed patterns and then lighting it and getting just the right shot at just the right angle!
But lately it had been getting harder and harder to get likes. I mean, this one girl was making bloody unicorns out of frozen yoghurt. And this other vegan blogger was making her bowl look like a beach scene with turtles made of fruit on a beach of granola next to a swirling green and blue spirulina smoothie sea, for heaven’s sake! It was no longer enough to put frozen berries on your smoothies, and that’s why I’d been thinking of going keto—you can do a lot with an avo, you know!
I looked down at the pile of food on my plate; it didn’t look appetizing at all, and a sudden need came over me. The need was so strong it was hard to resist. I tapped my fingers on the table and bit my lip, trying to push the need back down. But I couldn’t. I took my phone out of my handbag and tapped it against the palm of my hand—this was usually something that calmed me. But not this time. It only made the need so much worse. So much more intense, too hard to resist. So. Bloody. Hard! I couldn’t fight it any longer, and I wasn’t going to.
I reached for another plate and started putting the food onto it in a more Insta-worthy way. Lining the bacon up by size, smallest to biggest, trying to make the mushrooms into something that resembled art. The sausage, I had to confess, was not photogenic at all. It was fat and oozing and its porky skin had burst open on one side, displaying its insides like a mass of intestines. I moved the decorative vase of wildflowers closer to my plate, hoping it would distract from the sausage. I looked around the room for something, anything, to make this breakfast shot better.
There were only two other people in the restaurant, and I recognized them as the couple I’d met last night. I tried not to make eye contact with them as I rushed over to one of the free tables and grabbed another small vase of wildflowers. I put my plate in the middle of the table, wildflowers flanking it on both sides, salt and pepper shaker on the right, a napkin tossed next to the plate—it took me ages to get that napkin just right. To make it looked tossed, but in a perfect, pretty way.
The light in here was bad. I looked around again—one of the curtains was closed so I walked up to it and pulled it open. A shaft of light rushed towards my table, casting a warm glow across the plate. I scurried back to the table, a manic, frantic energy seizing me, and held up my phone. But the angle was all wrong. I moved around the table, taking different photos, but nothing seemed right. I needed to take the shot from above, so I climbed onto my seat. I turned when I heard whispers behind me. The couple quickly looked away and went back to pecking at their heinous-looking breakfasts. I heard another noise and swiveled my whole body, only to find what looked like the chef standing in the corner of the room. His arms were folded and he was eyeing me curiously. I gazed at them all, and then had another consuming need. To share my thoughts with them in two hundred and eighty characters or less. The need to share something with them felt overwhelming, like the need to make the things on my plate look pretty and take a photo of them. I hadn’t shared what I was doing with anyone in five days, and I usually shared everything! And in that moment, I felt like I was going to burst if I didn’t tell someone something. Anything.
“Hashtag blogger’s life.” The words flew out of my mouth. They just looked at me blankly. So I shot them a thumbs up emoji, expecting some likes back in return, only I didn’t get any. What was wrong with these people? Had they never seen anyone take a photo of their breakfast before? If you went out for breakfast in Joburg these days, everyone was taking photos of their food. No one ate their food when it arrived at the table anymore because everyone was trying to get the perfect #foodporn pic to post and . . .
The realization hit me again. Hit me like a kick to the gut. Why did I keep forgetting this? I looked at the almost-perfect picture of my breakfast and realized that I would not be able to post it. I would not be able to share my breakfast with the world, and for some reason that was once again hard to explain (especially without my mood-tracking app), this thought made me cry. I climbed down off the chair and slumped in my seat. I pushed my plate away and buried my head on the table and wept like a total idiot.
CHAPTER 7
“Are you okay?” I heard a voice behind me and peeped around. The chef was standing there.
“I’m thinking of going keto,” I said, and then suddenly didn’t know why I’d said that.
The man smiled. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”