This is the fifth time in that many days that my boss has asked me if I were eating. Eating? I look at her, puzzled, and then I laugh awkwardly and answer yes.

She keeps asking and I keep answering with always the nervous laughter--as if someone asking me about what food I take into my body is a trespass.

I have begun to avoid her--afraid of this exchange, nervous of the laughter that escapes my lips and that cornered feeling that gives rise to the hair on the back of my neck.

I eat when I remember to, which is enough. But there must be a marked difference about my person that keeps her concern fixed like a gun's scope on my face.

Because of this attention, I have become determined to eat lunch at my desk the rest of the week: today, pumpkin-squash soup spiced with cloves and onions. After a third of the bowl, I lost interest, and the rest remains for tomorrow's lunch, but I want to go into her office and offer proof--a sacrifice--that I am, indeed, passing food into my body.

But I wouldn't dare. Instead, I sit playing with the soup--spooning a spoon up, letting it drip back into the bowl, and I do this over and over again taking comfort in the diminuitive splashes.

I eat. I feel the stubbornness rise within me, and then I feel defeated.

I eat when I remember to, which is often not at all.

It will come at me at ten o'clock at night, or so--a growling and movement low in my stomach--empty air. And I think, oh, I am hungry.

And I walk the length of my apartment--from my room to the kitchen, and I find myself standing in the middle of the room as if I've forgotten the task I had set for myself.

I don't open the pantry to look for soup, or the freezer to check for imposter-meat patties, or the fridge to find some eggs. I turn, instead, on my heels and return to my room.

The empty air moves, still, in my stomach, but there is always something more pressing within me--and passing food through my body isn't the answer just now.

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