i hand the cashier my EBT card wearing vintage Cavalli and THE ROW.

In the Whole Foods, I consider signing up for Seeking Arrangements. I let myself think I should look to marry rich within the next five years and forbid reality from interrupting. Behind me, a millennial couple with a baby in a forward-facing stroller rattles off a list of processed organic items to a worker and asks if he could usher them around, did he mind? They were new to the area, new to the store and didn’t know where anything was. I savings-to-checking in the frozen foods section to afford the $9 white stark caviar several aisles down, then walk fifteen minutes past colonnades of luxury condominiums to the dollar store to purchase tinned sardines where strung-out men smoke cigarettes and holler amongst each other and pass a bottle back and forth. One swig per person till drained. Some families started rationing during the Great Depression and never stopped.

From the Walmart across the street, I purchase magnesium, B12, D3, fish oil pills, organic bananas, frozen veggies, chocolate-flavored Ensure Plus (16 grams of protein per bottle), coffee creamer, and eggs (7 grams of protein per egg). I purchase meat only during the second week of the month. My first meal of the day will be at 3:45. Whether or not this is a necessary constraint, I have forgotten. I have unintentionally been in an inconsistent caloric deficit for at least a year. Though several factors have recently given my budget more flexibility, I still cannot eat entire bowls of spaghetti or Chipotle in one sitting without the fullness giving way to momentary stomach discomfort. It comes in like sun on the back of my neck—every phantom measured by pressure valve rather than presence.

Every morning, I do a ten-minute Lilly Sabri pilates workout to alleviate light joint pain. Take two ibuprofen (200 mg each) only three times a week with cold water or culinary-grade matcha to avoid developing a tolerance to it. At 5pm and then again at 10, my phone’s alarm will go off with an accompanying reminder to “eat three tablespoons of Great Value Creamy Peanut Butter”, total calories 90 per serving, 3.5 grams of protein.

I stopped feeling the urgency of hunger after so many schooldays of being made to wait for a lunch always scheduled too late, forbidden from snacking. I’m only reminded of its consequence when it takes me longer than usual to retrieve a word I say on the daily or forget information I had internalized long ago.

Some people measure their years in time outlasted. For many reasons beyond the food aisles, I do not remember most of what occupied my thought over the past nine. Only that for a very long time the minute hand ticked, crossing not the hour but the threshold for novelty. After dropping off my groceries at home, I take a Lyft into Georgetown that costs a homely brunch. The people here jog in 40° weather at dawn. From a boutique, I buy a pullover priced at least four bags of store-brand rice, five pounds of fresh vegetables, two loaves of white bread, and two name-brand frozen pizzas. I buy two books worth ten cans of smoked oysters.

I do not mutter, “Wow, that’s an electricity bill!” when I try on a white polyester cardigan priced at least one month’s electricity bill in COS. I do not go, “Jesus Harold Christ” when the saleswoman at Blue Mercury tells me the smallest available decanting of perfume is still over $100. This month, I do not even have to commit these things to the ledger. Endurance is not an instinct, but an obligation I grow less able to define with urgency the further away I am from it.

The difference between the body collapsing and bending your legs in time to kneel just before you fall so you can claim you were only on your knees to ask for a small mercy—I still try to distinguish the two. I will be doing so for 1.5 more years, or until I leave this city. Migration is nonnegotiable. But the person I am when I leave the city may hate to be reminded of me when she finds there’s no path to walk that I haven’t corrupted the memory of—all paths leading to the grocery store, trudged to on 500 calories. Nonetheless, it’s intolerable to remain so close to life cycles you’ve completed from which nothing new can be born, for the same reason you eventually can’t take living in the same house so many family members had died in.

I don’t expect not to be stalked. Only that my final destination may or may not be roomier, the fridge may or may not be taller; that I may or may not recycle the same arguments—like the one where I accidentally check the pulse on my wrist with a thumb. Perhaps advantage, finally. Home, like hunger, is assigned by process of elimination. And eventually never living for anything beyond utility threatens its own kind of closure.

I retreat from Georgetown with three bags of moderate weight in their cumulative burden. My arms will be weak for the following two days despite carrying them for only twenty minutes. Before heading to the bus stop, I stop at a Joe & the Juice for a smoothie I have all the ingredients for at home. I compliment the brunette in line behind me on her necklace. She returns it by asking for my workout routine.