I'm a bit murky here

This should bring me up to approximately the summer of 1998. I wish I could remember that spring and summer with the clarity that I recall so much of my early Oprah experiences but I was in a highly dissociative state as I embraced my weight loss failure and my life became, once again, lonely and hopeless. My fantastic roommate who nursed me through my physical and emotional breakdown moved out and away to Los Angeles, a plan we once intended to complete together before I spent any and all of my savings on medical bills. I moved into my own apartment in a north shore suburb and attempted to settle back into my half-abusive, most certainly boring job and feel grateful that I had come through a pretty serious health scare mostly unscathed. I had managed to lose my dear friend from college over the past year as my grandiosity about my supposed transformation into my athletic and skinny self and then torturous decline into depression and chronic pain pushed her away and into her own successful weight loss and life transforming journey...without me. I know now that I deserved that and likely more. I felt abandoned and punished for even attempting to flip the script on my fat self. I had a new mission to find some new friends to populate to desolate landscape of my life and was on overdrive with binge eating. I found solace in a motley crew of work peers who were just as eager, for their own reasons, to be distracted from their lives and didn't really mind so much sharing a high calorie meal out from time to time.

Where my memory does come back into sharp focus is the spring of 1999. See, I really have glossed over a fairly decent chunk of a year there. I'm not certain I'd really like any of it back but it remains disconcerting to have no access to rather large chunks of one life. But the spring of 1999 is crystal clear. The spring of 1999 is when Kate went crazy in my one-bedroom apartment by the lake and effectively cracked open a small tear in my universe that would soon become a gaping hole.