Chapter Two: The Ding-Dong Diet

Memory is strange. That profound statement was circulating in my head that one auspicious morning while I tried to compose myself sufficiently to turn over the rest of my body to follow it and switch off the alarm. This feat accomplished, I fell back onto the pillow and pondered. I had awoken seconds earlier puzzled, trying to remember something, and not quite sure what.

Shrugging, I swept away the debris of bedclothes and plodded to the bathroom. The first splash of water on the face, followed immediately by a warm towel and heavy moisturizer never fails to make me feel almost alert, and by the time the coffee had percolated and the face cream had penetrated my arid skin, I was human again.

The breakfast television muffled, the fresh New York Times opened (the Sports section already recycled), and milky coffee steaming onto my moisturizer-clogged pores, I suddenly realized what I had been trying to recall: his smell. That completely identifiable smell on the back of his neck: a mixture of organic hair conditioner, generic baby oil, Caroline Herrera aftershave and a dash of musky sweat.

Intellectually, I knew the components. I had, after all, buried my face in his smell for ten months. But every morning for the past thirty-two, I had woken up missing that odor, and today I simply could not summon it from my memory bank.

This was a good thing, surely? I had wasted too many tears over a man who had treated me abominably. My friends were sick of hearing about him, which they only did if they were on my “Friends and Family” phone plan, or after nine, weeknights or on weekends. I, on the other hand, had to live with the fallout of the relationship, and was sick of talking about him.

But pining for Jimmy had been my life for so long that I was rather stumped as to what I was supposed to do now.

There are those out there in professions that cater to angst-ridden, middle-class, single women who would say that my prolonged attachment to a certainly lost love was just a barrier to protect myself from caring again. And they might be right.

But at least I had something to depend on. If I was dateless on a Saturday night, it was because there was no one who could remotely compare to him.

Once he was a dim memory, then what excuse did I have to be alone, other than the reason given by every single women in Manhattan: they’re all taken or gay, and the single ones are either mind-numbingly boring or arrogant pricks. Sometimes both.

I immediately commenced the Ding Dong diet. This consisted of existing almost entirely on caffeine, nicotine and Ding Dongs, a miraculous chocolate treat that could easily survive a nuclear holocaust and would probably be delicious to the cockroaches, its fellow post-apocalyptic roommates.

This nutritionally defunct snacking was accompanied by massive heaving sobs that racked my ever-dwindling body. I ran out of Kleenex and could not face going out to get more, so my sheets became embedded with tears and snot, combined with the remnants of our lovemaking. I stopped going to work or returning phone calls from worried friends. I lost the sympathy of these loyal companions, my job and twenty pounds.

During the sixth week, I woke up one morning (as one does in every blues song ever written. This has always made me wonder how the song would proceed had the subject not woken up one morning but had continued to sleep, or had died during the night), and looked around my bleak apartment, every crevice a memoir of my time with Jimmy.

On a whim, I called a moving company, had dozens of boxes delivered, sold everything I could on eBay, and shipped myself to a new town, just three thousand miles away from Los Angeles, and all memories therein.

When I got to Manhattan, skinny and bitter (the Ding Dong diet had worked and I looked fabulous in a Biafran, Kate Moss way), the smell of Jimmy had followed me. And it wasn’t the smell alone, but his voice, his touch, his hair. I would walk down the street and rush up to someone who wasn’t him. I heard him in every store in town, and whenever I wanted to, I could close my eyes and feel his hands on my skin.

And truth be told, I really wanted to be trailed by these ghost memories. I wasn’t prepared to let go of our time together. It was unthinkable. I had given so much of myself. The fact that the relationship had meant so little to him that he couldn’t even say goodbye bothered me beyond all logic and reasoning. Because there had been no closure, we were still together, surely, if on some elongated hiatus. At any time, I would look up from my desk, or open the door and see him there, sad and serious, begging my forgiveness and professing his love. This in spite of the fact that he hated New York and probably didn’t know I even lived here now.

In any event, that didn’t happen. I managed to get out of bed each morning (a natural progression from “I woke up one morning,” I assume) and get dressed (at least on the weekdays), find myself a new job and gradually meet people in my building, in my office, at the local Starbucks.

Sting, when fronting The Police a thousand decades ago, had once sung that there was a hole in his life, and now I understood. Taking the statement of a broken heart literally, it seemed like all the bulk therein had sunk into my stomach. Each and every one of my internal organs was coated in lead, like so many airplane black boxes. Had I died suddenly, the cause would have been recorded within my heavily coated kidneys, liver and lungs.

Naturally, my kidneys weren’t doing so well, because I needed a few glasses of wine to help me sleep; my liver was suffering as a result of the painkillers I had to down to face work with the resulting hangover, and my lungs were shot to hell from chain-smoking.

It was a passive suicide attempt, no doubt about it. I was unloved and unlovable. The love of my life didn’t even care enough about me to say goodbye, and the self-doubt was crucifying me.