Diary #10: Tequila, Teeth and the Quiet War I Waged on My Own Face
8:46am and I’m already squatting outside JB-HiFi like a deviant gremlin, eyeing the cheapest dissociation portals (headphones) with the hunger of a girl who hasn’t felt silence since Year 8.
My mouth tastes like sleep paralysis and matcha dust. I go live on TikTok. J is with me. Sam slips in: a planetary Leo with a face that makes New York City feel local. She’s the girl you imagine when you smell grapefruit body spray in a stranger’s car and think maybe I could do Pilates.
1:37pm and I yank J into the city like a shopping trolley with a broken wheel. We march into modeling agencies uninvited. I announce my face like a scene cut from Euphoria for being too real. Everything’s white and reflective and shaped like LinkedIn. A receptionist blinks at me - she has a gap in her teeth and a womb of judgment. I tell her I want to model. My voice does something ugly. The air is white leather. It squeaks when you breathe.
If they reject me, I’ll return not with vengeance, but with a proposition: a matcha date in a food court, maybe, or a shared silence in the park with nothing but the smell of sunscreen and glass-topped ambition. She looks like she used to be nice. I want to see what broke her.
Earlier that week: drunk off three tequila neats and popcorn the colour of radiation. We’re watching 28 Years Later. The film dances like brain static. The camera doesn’t move, it lurches.
I remember We Were Liars - read it when I was seventeen and suburban. Kyneton. Sunday. The lawn was dehydrated. Phil, the family dog, had one foot in heaven and the other in the bin. I cried about fictional boys because I didn’t know how to cry about real ones. I cried because Logan Lerman would never kiss me with intention.
J, Sarah, Chris. We’re at some bar that’s pretending to be a tavern. Chris is the kind of man you describe by saying “he’s actually really nice.” He buys drinks like he’s been knighted. Sarah speaks like she’s already written the dissertation. Her earrings are small Indigenous flags glued to wire. I can’t tell if it’s political or spiritual or both. We play pool. Two Tommys materialise in the bathroom. Security guards hover. They call me sweetie and my body accepts it like communion.
We watch The Many Deaths of Nora Dalmasso. Dubbed in the wrong language. Everyone talks like they’ve never been inside their own mouth. It’s like watching surveillance footage of someone else’s psychotic break. Feels illegal in the way dreams do.
Instagram poll asked three things:
how to lose weight
weight loss tips
what i eat in a day
Answer: You don’t need to lose weight. I don’t either. That girl on your feed with the $2000 jawline and trauma-core Tumblr aura doesn’t either. You don’t need control, you need to hallucinate something holier than your hunger. Calories aren’t the enemy. They’re kindling for your chaos. You need fuel to be delusional, fuel to fantasise, fuel to lie to your therapist with conviction.
Weight loss? Anxiety. Weight gain? Information. But that’s for another context, a different flavor of madness. I need to be in a silk robe and eating canned peaches from a cold spoon to explain that one.