But also. May I tell more about the stomach? I had been thinking, idly, on Friday and Saturday about what last Thursday�s entry would have looked like had I knocked off the pussyfooting and instead given rein to the unbracketed angry part I began to be able to tap into, that began to become, two weekends ago. It would have been in all caps and full of invective, and it would have how-would-you-have-liked-it-Todd-you-bastard invoked real actual blood and guts comma mine; it would have had a lot of How Dare You in it, and How Could You Presume To Know. There Was No Excuse. And that had been my orientation � in an odd tentative way I don�t like about myself, as though every second I wanted to be angry I also had to be asking myself, in a polite and well-modulated deferential voice, if I could please have permission to do so � since the previous weekend and especially since I�d dished the dirt to Number Two last Wednesday; that and also internally flailing because what else I don�t like about myself is how long I took it and how much even in taking it I loved him; what kind of a sick fuck am I? And then I saw him sitting on the barstool just like any other person in the world would sit on a barstool, smoking a cigarette the same way every smoker does, and rather than thinking of him as he who had etc. or under whose influence I had broken apart and lost touch with so many pieces of myself, at once it hit me that he was just a bag of flesh. That is the phrase that came immediately to mind, bag of flesh. I don�t know why. I don�t have words for the connotations that attached to this thought, they are barely apprehensible to me except as something that made me feel very sad and vulnerable, pitying, but also more distant in that moment than I would have ever thought I could be. When Vanessa and I were driving down the highway several weeks ago, looking at the Amazon building and me talking about how strange it felt to be so far away from Todd already, those were the words. But Saturday was what truly comes before the words, and what will always be beyond them. Saturday was some kind of visceral real thing. How could I have said the things I did to him, how can he have said them to me? How can I have been that person? Maybe the shock of revulsion, this is just occurring to me as I type, is that I hadn�t seen him in all that time, and the body remembers differently from the brain, I know it does. And my dumb body remembered, as a reflex, and at the same time the act of remembering felt to it like a violation.

And the posture. I�d taken it for granted that although he was there with a few friends none of them was his date, and then the next day I caught myself taking it for it granted and I asked myself why and this was the answer: that imperceptibly I could tell by the way he held himself that there was no Ms. Lady on the scene. That I felt I could make this call, with some degree of authority, was a violation too. I�ve gotten my share of raised eyebrows about how I�m livin� lately, Oh you sure did get over Todd in a hurry, and I think what I know now that I didn�t before is, good god, there are a lot of different kinds of getting over. Sorry to sound maudlin or na�ve � and, note: the last thing I am is one iota conflicted about having written Todd that letter, one iota of anything but dazzled and constantly blown away by Steve � but it is true. When I met up with Mrs. Roboto last Thursday, at one point she asked me what my gut instinct was with respect to a certain personal matter, and, all right, I will tell you what I told her, I told her that I don�t have a gut instinct anymore, I can�t and won�t trust it. This is because one morning in December of 2001, drowsily waking up in my bed with Todd, I was trying to tick off in my head the list of what my day would have in it, errands or whatever, and I couldn�t, because the only thought in my head was what had suddenly become a certainty � I knew it, I *knew* it � that I was going to marry Todd one day and that all of my days after that would begin with some variation on this same scene. I was terrified of this and I thought that surely I must be psycho and I tried to get away from it, but the big thought was like the cotton in a pill bottle that holds everything else on the bottom and muffles its noise and movement. The big thought was all I was capable of. It filled up my head and held all of me � my body � down as if demonstrating the concept of inevitability, it was both sweet and tough, and little by little over what must have only been a few minutes, I let myself open up to it, because after all a certainty is a certainty, I�d had that feeling before about other things and it had never misled me. Through all the breakups and the mistrust and the accusations and you know what else, there was a secret part of me that was always serene because it resided in the future yet ordained universe where the thing was going to come true that my own mind and my body already knew. That part was waiting, up ahead, for the rest of me � or for the rest of it, I don�t know. That�s the wrongest, by miles and miles, I have ever been in my life, and there�s a sense in which I don�t know how I�ll trust myself again.

Sorry also for getting too personal there.

Sunday afternoon I made a showoffy couscous item and this, with a few changes � slightly less coconut milk, no garlic because I didn�t have any, and I did not puree before adding the lamb � and it was excellent. It turns out that one of those philosophical impasses between me and Steve is lentils. He likes them saturated and falling apart, whereas I prefer them not quite al dente but in a state of structural integrity. I don�t think this has to be a dealbreaker. I brought him a Tupperware containerful and he can stew it for a while longer. Also possibly in the Bad Feminist department: one of my favorite things about having a boyfriend, is bringing him food.

I�m not going to write in my diary tomorrow. I have a lot to do at Gastro, and I was a big slacker today. Oh, and this morning I got a call from the HR lady asking me why I was not at new employee orientation. I told her it was because I didn�t know I was supposed to be. She said I was, and someone should have called me about it. So that is a funny way of letting me know, but the point is that I, like, have a job. OK. Thank you very much.