I mostly ate the same sorts of things. My jaw hurt, the nerves like exposed rock on a mountaintop that is harried by the wind. I took the last of a bottle of vicodin leftover from when I got a tooth pulled in 2008, and then wouldn’t let myself have anymore. Without the vicodin the pain danced around in my skull like electricity, moving from one side of my jaw to the other, up into my skull where it pulsed like a flashlight. I worried about getting food stuck in the red empty socket. I checked the socket in the mirror after eating. I imagined a little piece of bread in there, a flax seed. Bumping against the raw nerves like a buoy in the sea.

I made juice to drink from beets and carrots and celery and a handful of kale from the garden. There was stuff on the top like cappuccino foam. It tasted sweet. I made a smoothie from frozen raspberries that C brought me. I made split pea soup, frying the carrots and onions in bacon grease before adding them to the pot. I made kale salad with lemon juice and olive oil. I bought gluten-free carrot flax muffins and ate them with C out in front of her school, on the sidewalk in the sunshine.

Today I was tired so I took the lightrail home instead of riding my bike up the big hill. I went to the grocery store. I talked to the man at the meat counter and he said that the “natural” bacon there comes from factory farm pigs. They just aren’t fed any antibiotics, he said. That’s what makes them different. I imagined the pigs in stalls so small they couldn’t turn around. I imagined the workers saying mean things to the pigs. I put the bacon in my cart and bought it but thought that maybe next time I wouldn’t. I got a package of raspberries and a cauliflower. The air outside was warm and bright. At home I sat in a kitchen chair in the sun and ate the raspberries. I could hear the freeway, and see the neighbor’s windows up close to the fence. Last night they had their porchlight on all night. It was so bright it was like a spotlight, throwing pale squares of light through the windows of my cottage, making my room grey and soft purple like a room in a movie where it is supposed to be night, but you can see everything. I had lain awake, wondering why they had such a bright light, if they were trying to signal something. If they had lost a ship in the harbor. If maybe no-one had told them that the harbor was gone, that a highway had been built there, a neighborhood, neighbors so close their pears fell on your roof and they could see in your windows. Today the apartment looked empty, the blinds were drawn back and the walls I could see were bare and white.

After eating in the sun I lay in bed with all my school reading on my chest and instead of reading it, I fell asleep. My jaw hurt and if my body couldn’t have opiates well then it wanted to sleep instead. It was dark when I woke and I went inside the house. Toby was there and I made some bacon to share with her. The bacon didn’t cook right and there were pieces of fat left, firm and rubbery. I packed kale salad and injera for my lunch tomorrow. C called from work and said that she had eaten three skittles, a square of fruit leather and a three by two inch rice krispy treat. She was walking her bike to the broadway bridge. It was a nice night, clear and not yet cold. It hardly feels like October the way I imagine October should feel. It feels like a clear warm in-between place, a last hurrah before the rains come.

And therein concludes a week’s record of the food I (mostly) ate.