March 4, 2021:
The truth is I was afraid of her.
She'd become obese, her formerly graceful dancer's frame smothered inside what seemed like an exceptionally disgusting meat suit. She smelled like sweat and Avon, her smile, rare as it was, was like the leer on a jack-o-lantern. She was deathlike and obscene, and she jiggled.
This was terrifying to me because she was gone. Like our apartment, like my home. There was no more her, only this thing which had so grotesquely invaded her life. She was an interloper, a golem, a bodysnatcher. I looked at her and thought, What have you done with her!?
My selfishness in all of this was radical and essentially narcissistic. I was not sympathetic to her obvious pain. Instead it was all about me. All of it. About what I'd somehow lost.
So that even when she sometimes wanted contact I pulled away, because contact felt like some kind of monstrous capture. Like I'd be somehow pulled into the same void where she'd gone, and there'd be no more me.