I used to have a girlfriend.

One that was part of an extremely, strange, chaotic phase in my life, and was caught up in her own, even stranger, more chaotic phase of life. She was smart, beautiful, and yet, in some ways, not very bright and quite trashy. We met over red velvet waffles and mutual friends, then argued over whether or not food was the ultimate pleasure of life. From that day on, we were connoisseurs, collecting recipes and specialty ingredients while bonding over food network and Lauren vitale cooking videos. With her witty remarks, extreme mood swings, and constantly low eyes, she resembled a younger, possibly more broken crossover of Amy Winehouse and the 2007 Britney Spears… She distanced herself from those who love her, convinced that her only role was to be a martyr, and caused scenes wherever she went.

But the thing I’ll always remember her by the most is the fact that she always had an appetite. She could eat for hours at a time, never failing to find something calorie-filled to indulge in. The funny thing is her weight never fluctuated… she stayed skinny and I always wondered how she did it.

She sketched and painted things that made me want to crawl out of my own skin, and she opened up to about her shambled, rough past. How she used to starve… how she never ate dinner with her family unless forced to… how she went to rehab… how she never had an appetite, for though she would crave a brownie, she would refuse her stepmother’s offer with a tone of irritation, the voices in her mind convincing her that it’d be a terrible idea, a sin of sorts. I couldn’t grasp the concept. How could she go from viewing all food with seething hatred, to suddenly eating literally everything in her path? How could she flip her appetite on and off like a readily available light switch? I never expected to understand it.

Together, we reveled in our appetites, baking cookies and making way more food than we could ever stomach. We built and developed our taste preferences, and never worked out, preferring to binge watch hours of Netflix at a time, instead.

And then, one day, our relationship burned, crisp pieces of our ingredients singing with a sick hiss, and my appetite burned with it, caving in on itself like a half-baked cake. And, for once, I understood… because while digesting all the recipes that we had invested time into perfecting, I had managed to starve the parts of myself that stored bowls of expectations and knowledge of self-worth.

Though the dissolve of what we had was eventually distance induced, my subconscious had been fighting to make me more aware of the disorder that I had graced myself with, since the day I’d labeled her as something more than a friend. I came to terms with it, accepted that I’d been in denial, and completed the first step.

But… I no longer had an appetite. Or, a girlfriend.