“Fill the void, feather your nest” - Jordan Sara Kurtzman

She was in the middle of ordering a grain bowl from UberEats when she was struck by the absurdity of paying fourteen dollars plus tip plus delivery for a bowl of quinoa and beans. But really: you can pack your lunch every day, eat the same boring salad for years on end, and you’ll never be able to buy a house, so why don’t you just order the fucking grain bowl? So she did.
 
She’d quit drinking recently - to lose weight, but she would never say that out loud - and had developed something of an itchy trigger finger, always on the lookout for little dopamine hits. In short, she was spending too much fucking money. She owned fifteen pairs of jeans, not including the pairs that didn’t fit, and, except for two Fridays each month, she couldn’t wear jeans to work. The jeans were for another, parallel version of her - she would wear these jeans on the vacation she wouldn’t actually go on or while hanging out with old friends who now only communicated with her by texting her pictures of their toddlers.
 
She’d recently counted the number of eyeshadow palettes she owned and felt physically sick. I work for a fucking bank, she thought to herself. I can’t wear interesting makeup.
 
Watching a nature documentary while on the treadmill, she came to the realization that she was a bird, feathering her nest.

She was feathering her nest with forty-five dollar mineral sunscreen, two hundred and ten dollar loafers, twenty-five dollar lipstick, and the loot from several trips to the Container Store.
 
She only felt good about spending money on working out. She’d always been a bit of a fitness dilettante, but now, she wanted to get focused, and by focussed, she meant ripped. Or thin. Or thin and ripped. She looked back at pictures of herself from five years ago - when she’d felt so fat, when she kept googling the phrase “do I have an eating disorder” - and saw that she had been, in fact, very thin. She knew that, on some level, she would look back at her current self with the same wistfulness.
 
She joined a crossfit gym. Realizing she hated crossfit, she quit that gym and joined another one. She took group classes with names like “Metabolic Blast” and “Insane Abs.” She nodded at her fellow exercisers, bleary-eyed and sweaty at 6:15 AM.
 
And yet: you’re never going to have a 6-pack, so just eat the fucking bagel.
 
You’re never going to be able to retire, so go on that solo trip to Costa Rica.
 
Her friend from her now-defunct book club, Marie, had recently started texting her more often. She was trying to plan girls’ nights with the scant available girls. Trying to plan a spa day that no one wanted to attend. Marie had broken up with her boyfriend and was trying to fill the new void in her life with evites and paperless post events for her few single friends. She wanted to tell Marie that you cannot fill the void. You should become comfortable with the void and float weightlessly through your life for as long as possible.
 
Maybe working all day in finance on abstract numbers had warped her sense of reality. It seemed, most of the time, like nothing was real. Her dream self - the self that wore the jeans, used the eye shadow palettes, lost the weight - seemed just as real as credit default swaps.
 
His apartment was gross and messy in the way that suggested that something had gone terribly wrong in his brain and/or life, but she fucked him anyway. He was over six feet tall. He had nice arms. He was a good kisser. But she couldn’t stop thinking about his greasy sheets and faked her way through sex that she might have been able to enjoy in a cleaner space. When she went home, she threw all her clothes in the dryer for an hour on high to kill any bed bugs she may have tracked home with her. She took a shower.
 
She put on a headband and did her skincare routine. She felt like she was hovering above herself, just a thought bubble disconnected from her body. Looking in the mirror, she thought:
 
Fill the void.
 
Feather your nest.
 
Dream of a clean, white wall.
 
Instead, unfortunately, she dreamed of all the men without furniture. In college, she hooked up with a guy who had one pillow. He offered to make her a pillow by rolling up a sweatshirt and putting it in a pillowcase. She still regretted not leaving - she slept on a lumpy sweatshirt out of a mix of politeness and not wanting to dismantle the image she had of the guy in her head. He was so smart! So handsome! The fact that he had one pillow and didn’t offer to let her use it didn’t fit with how she saw him or the relationship that she’d built up in her head.
 
She’d recently dated a corporate lawyer who lived in a furnished apartment that looked like a hotel room. No pictures, no personal touches other than a used coffee mug or a dirty t-shirt on the couch. He had the apartment of someone who was waiting for his life to begin, as if he wanted to keep a blank slate in case a wife happened to fly into his window with a rubbermaid full of family photos and holiday decor.
 
In her dream, she tried to sit down on a chair at a former Hinge date’s apartment, but the chair was gone and she fell through the floor, endlessly falling until she woke up at 4:30 AM and realized that she was, in fact, very hungover.
 
After staying in bed for an indeterminate number of hours - spent staring at the ceiling or at her phone, through which she ordered a delivery of pedialyte via Instacart  - she headed to her forty dollar workout class. She didn’t want to lose the money. She also didn’t want to spend the entire day feeling like a total piece of shit.
 
She checked into her Pilates class, and for a moment, thought about telling the instructor that she was on the verge of throwing up. But looking at the Pilates instructor, a very thin woman in her forties who always looked a little sad, she couldn’t do it. She didn’t want to get kind, awkward advice from a relative stranger. And worse, the boutique fitness-speak of “I got you, mama” or any other generic girl power-toned phrase would be too much to bear.
 
It’s fifty minutes, she thought to herself. Toughen the fuck up.
 
She lay on her back and the world spun at first, and then calmed down. The sad-eyed Pilates instructor gently encouraged her and the other six women and one probably gay man to curl up a little higher, to squeeze a little tighter. “Get the most out of each movement,” she said, semi-inspirationally.
 
You can never stop trying, she thought. You’re not allowed to relax. She wondered if she’d ever get the abs she’d wanted since sixth grade.
 
The class was in the middle of some glute exercise that involved awkwardly lying on their sides on a moving machine when she started to cry. Not sob - water just leaked out of her eyes. She blinked. She felt a catch in her throat. She wiped her eyes with her bare, sweaty arm, and that only made things worse.
 
The Pilates instructor crouched down in front of her.
 
“Are you okay?”
 
She said yes. She wasn’t sure what was happening. No, she didn’t need a break.
 
“I’m sweating from my eyes.”
 
She did, in fact, need a break. She needed to leave. She stepped out of the class, stumbling. She put on her sunglasses. She wondered why her eyes were still leaking. She thought she saw her dream self - wearing the impractical jeans, drinking a matcha latte - walk by and disappear around a corner. She needed to go home and, while deep cleaning her bathroom, generate her alternative self for the week and daydream about who she could be.