Chapter 8

The morning arrived sooner than she wished. Funny how nightmares can cause the same headache as hangovers. She tried rolling over to avoid the light coming through the window, but it was of no use; instead she stretched and rolled out of the bed with a slight moan. Looking at her watch she realized it was only 6am. She quietly crept to the kitchen to find coffee, careful not to make noise and awake her friendly hostess.Arriving in the kitchen she was surprised to find that the woman was already awake, sitting there, sipping coffee, and eating a muffin. “Carbs,” she thought, “not the best way to start a morning”.“Rough night, huh?” the woman said to her passing the tray of muffins her way.Although she thought better of it, she took a muffin and began picking at it. She had forgotten how great a mixture of flour and sugar can make one feel. The still warm muffin seemed to relax her. The soft-warm-juiciness of the blueberries brought her comfort. The woman handed her a cup of coffee to complete the feeling and they sat quietly for what seemed like hours.“Do you want to tell me what last night was about?” Rose gave Laura a look that made Laura feel like she was a naughty five year old.The girl just shook her head and continued eating. She remembered how someone once told her that food was a fuel not an emotion, and although she truly believed it in her old world, she now questioned it. How can this muffin make her feel so much better? She smirked when she thought about the look of shock that would be on people’s faces back home as she ordered her non-fat, non-dairy, organic latte and then asked for a muffin – something that seemed akin to eating an entire bag of candy in her world.“Enjoying the muffin?” the woman smiled, almost as if she knew what the girl had been thinking.“I forgot how good real food was…”They both laughed at the idea of people eating non-real food; however, that was a reality in Laura’s world. Although people would go for this macronutrient, organic “lifestyle”, no one really ate food – no one thought to stop and ask what exactly was in the “green drink” that they grabbed each morning, the energy bars they ate at lunch, or the high protein shakes that they “drank” at dinner or worse, the healthy cleanse of lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper that one drank when they had eaten “bad food”. She began to question the healthiness of health food that wasn’t really food…people who as children would never think of eating something that tasted that horrible now willing to guzzle down green slime in the name of health. No wonder the organic juice bar crowd always looked so starvingly skinny, it was too hard to eat enough to survive when one only “ate” things that tasted horrible.“There was a time in my life I didn’t eat…it made sense to me then…I am not so sure about it now,” the girl began to pick the last of the muffin away from the wrapper, “food is nice sometimes I think. I mean, real food that doesn’t make you want to gag when you eat it.”The woman smiled and replied back, “you know, people use to survive just fine before the advent of fad diets. I always question how busy someone’s life must be that they need to drink greens instead of just cooking for a couple minutes.” They laughed again for a bit, then the woman said, “so what do you want to do, my dear?”The girl looked at her unsure what she meant, then quietly answered, “I need to hide for a while – disappear from the world.”The woman nodded, “You should call someone so that people know where you are. I’m assuming someone would notice if you don’t show up for work tomorrow?”The girl nodded agreeing before she realized that she really had no clue who to call. Should she call one of her assistants? What would they think, would they truly even noticed if she didn’t come into work? Her friends and family had long since been alienated. She thought better of calling anyone…she would send an email and text from her phone telling everyone that she had gone to a retreat. Yes, that was the best plan, many women in her age group did that – went to cleansing retreats, aka rich people rehab, to unwind. No one would question that she thought, it was a normal happening.With emails and texts completed, and no sign of anyone questioning the validity of what she had said, she moved back to the kitchen feeling insecure about what she had just done. She had given it all up, ran from her world into a world completely unknown to her. She was scared. Scared at facing the reality of what and who she had become, scared at confronting the past, scared at not being – she felt herself lost without work – without the crazy world she left behind. She was unsure if she, as a person, not just a living being, really did exist without that world. She lost her sense of self.Panic began to set in. She reached for a cup of coffee shaking, breathing shallow yet rapidly. The room spun and she felt more alone and lost than she ever had in recent months. She dropped the coffee and ran to the sink throwing up, clutching the side of the sink in a desperate attempt to not fall over. Her grip failed and she slid to the floor hugging her knees and crying softly into the crook of her arm. How did she get to this point? How did she push so hard to ignore everything she that she landed in some woman’s home after crashing her car? She had failed, and as much as she tried to convince herself that this break was just that, a break, she knew that the truth was more along the lines that she had broke - that she pushed herself to the point that she fell apart into a crumbled mess on the floor.The room continued spinning and her breaths were no longer controlled by her – shallow and rapid they took her through dark closing doors until the spinning was to much and the dizziness overtook her. She lay motionless on the floor falling from reality into a quiet dark place where the truth no longer had to exist.