I’ve been eating. A lot. Too much. As if the restaurants and grocery stores are going to run out of food. At a certain point, this was the case for my family; in the Soviet Union, the stores did run out of food. Sometimes, they were never even full to begin with. Now decades later, in a food-stable country, the survivalist instincts are still there. For my family, food isn’t sustenance, it is sport; we talk about eating and plan to eat and eat while talking about what to eat later, then eat again, and complain that we’ve eaten too much.
I’m consuming so much food my clothing no longer fits. All of my jeans cut into my waist, leaving angry crevices behind. But I don’t mind. I like feeling as if I’m fattening myself up for sacrifice; a big, plump juicy body ready to be handed over. To whom or what? I’m not sure. But I’d rather be a sacrificial lamb than a gluttonous pig.
You know, it’s funny, standing in my parents’ bathroom this morning, struggling to wrap a towel completely around my body, I thought of my wedding day, about how small I’d become. My life felt too indulgent then, too full of love and good fortune. So, I stopped eating. I became smaller. My tailor tsked when she had to take in my wedding dress one inch, then another, and then another. I was delighted. Things felt equal then; my life was full and my stomach empty.
After getting married, and marching into adulthood, a natural balance came back into the fold. I stopped focusing on what I put inside my body. Some days were good, some days were bad. Good? I got my first TV writing job. Bad? I got hit by a car. Good? We bought a house. Bad? The pandemic shut down our city. And so it went. Good. Bad. Good. Bad. Everything balanced to a manageable rhythm.
Until last year, on this exact day, when an unwell person clutching a rifle opened fire during a Fourth of July parade. This person traumatized my friends, shot my campers, and murdered my cousin. The balance was disrupted to such an unimaginable extent that I couldn’t even find the scale.
I came home to LA and slept. For weeks. When I woke up everything was still off balance. I slept some more. It didn’t work. I went to the ocean. I went to the woods. I went to the desert and to the mountains. I took some pottery classes and deleted my Twitter. I wrote and wrote more and then wrote again. I took some drugs and did therapy. But nothing was sticking. So I put my things into cardboard boxes and moved them further North. Away from my life. Away from everything I knew. And that helped. A lot.
But as I got further from my old life and closer to The Day It Happened, I began to feel the imbalance again…I felt empty. So I began to eat, with abandon, trying to get full.
Just yesterday, I had: french toast, corned beef hash with extra hashbrowns, three cups of coffee with fresh squeezed orange juice, a plate of fried pickles and a salad to make the fried pickles feel healthy, a Bloody Mary, a session sour, a hibiscus pale ale, ranch fries, a negroni slushie, a sangria, elote with fried avocado on top, lumpia, mussels with crostini, a second batch of fries, pork bao, duck bao, when that wasn’t enough I stole two enormous bites of Sam’s burger with an added egg on top, as the yolk dribbled down my chin, I chased it down with a gin cocktail, then a vodka cocktail, and for dessert; I had ice cream, three munchmallows (some sort of terrible Serbian candy my babushka got at the 99 Cent store), I searched for the Ziploc bag of chocolate chip cookies but remembered I’d finished them all the night before, and then I stopped eating because I fell asleep. This, I remind you, is just a 24-hour snapshot of my current dietary habits.
I know I’m not balancing out the universe by eating like an animal, but I don’t know how else to feel full. Especially today when so much is missing.
Back in Highland Park, everything feels normal, and…it’s…maddening. The town is bustling and peaceful…boring even. There are 4th of July discounts at the grocery store, little American flags wave hello from the McMansions, the president is dealing with a mass shooting all the way on the East Coast. It’s business as usual here. I hate it. There should be a big seam in the middle of the town. A fiery red scar pulsating with angry lava and a little placard that reads “Here is the aftermath of the 4th of July Parade Shooting; seven people killed, 48 wounded.” I want to bring people to its edge and point into the void, “That’s where my cousin—the one with the long hair, black belt, and baby boy—fell in.” But there’s no gaping void to point to. Just middle-aged women waddling to nail appointments and elderly, spandexed men sagging into their expensive bike seats. The suburbs. What do you expect? Nothing happens until something happens and when that something happens, we try to go back to nothing as quickly as possible.
Even though there’s no physical void, I still find myself staring into it, getting lost in its pull. The French call it l'appel du vide, “The call of the void.” It’s the feeling one gets when they peer over a cliff and think about jumping off, or drive over a bridge with the urge to swerve into obliteration. Simply put, it’s the impulse to hurl yourself into the void. Some people will read my fascination with “the void” and grow concerned (please don’t), others will recognize the same feelings within themselves. Allegedly there’s a 50/50 split; some people hear the call and others think those people are insane. What I like about l'appel du vide is that it sounds so nefarious and dramatic, a gorgeous phrase, but it’s really just a humdrum human phenomenon—some strange instinct leftover in the depths of the amygdala. You see the void, you feel its threat, and you continue on with your life; you chose to step away from the edge of the cliff.
It’s 10:14 am CST the exact moment the shooter took Irina from our family, from her parents, from her son. The exact moment an invisible, bottomless pit of ravenous sadness opened up in the middle of my town, in the middle of my life, in the middle of my body. There are sirens in the distance. It could be a tribute. It could be a tragedy. I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m sitting in my too-tight towel, hair dripping wet, figuring out what to do with this l'appel du vide. I need to stop heeding its call, to stop feeding it. But maybe I can start bringing people to its edge, if only to point down inside and show the place where my cousin used to be.