Streaks

I’m excavating my life for sources of control when I feel like I have none

While walking down Broadway more than a few months ago, I told Leah about an intense craving for steak I’d harbored for a few days. It’s the one thing we can’t yet substitute with wheat gluten or tempeh or soy, not like the vegan reuben at Chicago Diner or the vegetarian protein nuggets at Saigon Shack. What I wanted was a steak, with orange peel and thick chunks of onion like my dad made from a Marlboro cookbook published in the ‘90s.

Leah asked me why I didn’t eat meat. I rattled off the usual answers: better for the environment, save the animals, save the planet, save the future, etc etc. But really the reason was that I hadn’t eaten meat in three years and I couldn’t very well start again now.

“Well, yeah, you could,” Leah said. “You could do it if you wanted to. Do you want to?”

Maybe, I said. But it didn’t matter, because I couldn’t. It would break the streak.

Then: “You’re gonna die one day, Annabel, and then all the streaks will be broken.”

I have thought about this sentence often since it fell out of Leah, casual and brilliant, puncturing my common sense. It’s peculiar and jolting to recognize your particular thought process as inessential, your instincts as utterly conceived. How many times have I explained my logic to a confounded expression? How many times has Leah been my skeptic?

Today I sit in Montana, considering what time I should head out on my run. Since being home in the isolated wilderness, I’ve run every day, just a couple of miles to stretch my surroundings beyond the walls of my grandmother’s living room. It’s cooler today, supposed to rain in the evening; I just ate some eggs for breakfast and can’t leave until my stomach is relatively empty, or else I’ll develop a cramp under my right rib. I could, I suppose, not run today at all — but I am again concerned with the streak, which has been established for nearly a week. To stop now would be to risk the entire affair.

My days are dictated by routine. I map every hour in my Google Calendar, office hours and happy hours and Birds of Prey at AMC Kips Bay. I go to the gym on Tuesdays and Fridays; I go to Think Coffee after.

I can’t seem to understand the point of routines if they can halt at any moment. If I stop now, when will I start again?

To live everyday within one house has ruptured the importance I’ve conceived around regimen. I wear leggings when I leave and slip my pajamas back on upon return. Like everyone else isolating at home, my time is split between my bed and the couch; I laid in bed for seven hours yesterday, between Zoom classes and homework.

Before the virus, I funneled my desire for control into my routine. Self-isolation, instead of alleviating, has compounded my need for structure, when everything else associated with daily life has fallen apart. I am afraid of sliding into something resembling My Year of Rest and Relaxation, sleeping through hours and days, lying corpse pose on my mattress. I’m inclined to think, if my anxiety treasures streaks, that I should train myself to neglect them — but I’m excavating my life for sources of control when I feel like I have none.

Maybe the best thing now is to forgo discussions of living healthily in explicitly unhealthy circumstances. I’m tired of trying to figure out the right way to live with anxiety; it already overwhelms my brain, I don’t want it to overwhelm my life.

I’ll probably go for a run today. In the grand scheme of things, a two mile jog will benefit me more than convincing myself it won’t. I probably won’t eat meat again, because the virtues of vegetarianism outweigh my brief cravings. I’m starting to understand life as a series of questions that have to be answered when they emerge. Crossing bridges, you know.

But I’m going to die one day, and all of my streaks will be broken. None of this will matter. It would do me well to think of that future as now.

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