Cold Slices

It’s a good trade off, right? Buy a breakfast that has enough calories for two meals, walk it off. You take more out than you put in. But why does something have more calories because it has pieces of lettuce and tomatoes on it? Apparently, it’s healthier to just have an egg between two pieces of bread. I mean, from what I heard calories are an outdated, Victorian way of measuring health, but unless they have something else to replace it, I’ll follow that. Either way, buying breakfast instead of making it is getting too expensive. After this walk I gotta buy food.

Entering the grocery store reminded me of when I used to work the night shifts at one. One of the guys there who gets on everyone’s nerves. After running out of people to target, I was next, and it worked because it usually does. To be fair, he was right on at least one thing. I would watch my steps and go to the gym, but he would see me eat the worst shit. But he would talk about it as if the only thing I ate was chocolate cake, which I would finish in fifteen minutes. He would not let me hear the end of it.

There’s something about going through those aisles – bread, Cajun flavored chicken, blue cheese, paper towels, floor wipes, Indonesian noodles. A few months out of that job and I felt like a different person, like someone with a bad idea of what good food is like. Maybe I should go back to my old ways. A chocolate cake with a chocolate bar to go with it. The latter is a good idea, so I have an excuse not to wear a mask. For a while at least, I’m not that much of a monster.

While walking back home, my stomach grumbles. This usually happens. I’ve tried changing my diet and nothing works. What’s the point of doing better things if your body doesn’t change with it?

…

Rashad was sore after his first night as an under the table laborer in a long while, but he wanted to go out and get coffee anyway, so we did. For him, a regular French vanilla and for me, a small chocolate iced coffee with milk. It took a while for our orders to be completed so we hung around for just enough time for the next person to come up to the cashier and order.

This guy didn’t have a mask on, and the worst part is, he works for the city. Anyone could have snapped a photo of him and make it viral so that it would reach the Mayor, who insists that all of his employees wear masks. I don’t know if Rashad noticed him. I’m debating pointing out that other guy since he was already sore, literally.

We walk back home, and I ask him a question.

“So, what would you say if I went back to the gym?”

“I’ll say that if you do, you no longer have a moral backbone and that you’re basically like a Trump supporter.”

“But I just wanna be skinny again. How do I become skinny again?”

“Just don’t eat.”

“Ok. You’re a medical student, and I will take your advice.” You can figure out how I said that.

“I still don’t get what you said to be earlier, that even strip clubs have better health regulations than gyms.”

“They’re catering to what they think they’re customer base is. Like those guys who buy the snake oils that Joe Rogan is trying to sell on his stupid podcast.”

“But I thought people who go to the gym are about getting healthier.”

“No, it’s the appearance of health. That appearance of health is like juicing yourself and drinking all those protein shakes so that you look like all the other guys on Instagram. But those guys haven’t eaten a fucking salad in a while.”

I say as a slurp my drink, which is more chocolate than coffee at this point.

…

I gulp the last drops of the chocolate flavored coffee I started drinking. Now I don’t have to drink it cold. This tastes so good that I don’t care what it is or isn’t doing to my body.

My body still has to settle from the morning. Pain. I couldn’t look at the bathroom mirror more than once today. Hair standing up on its own.

Thankfully, no one gets to see this. Not a lot of people anyway. I do prefer my hair puffy like this, it’s better than when I shower, and all the volume disappears. The puffy face is a different matter. Thankfully, I’m only answering work e-mails. And I’m promising to get work done. If they saw the way I look now, they wouldn’t be so optimistic. But I’m sure that they’ve seen worse guys. I *was* better looking until I stopped caring about what I ate and just followed what my mouth was craving.

My taste buds are doing fine while everything else isn’t. I haven’t been sleeping properly. I turn on the AC before I go to sleep, but it’s so loud it keeps me up at night.

“Doesn’t it just turn into white noise,” Rashad asked. He’s surprisingly not mad at me even though I borrowed his fan the one time and I promised it was just going to be ten minutes, but ten minutes turned into an hour.

“No. I’m happy when Gary turns it off. I’m still sorry about last night, by the way. I feel like if I get my own fan it’s still going to be loud.”

“I don’t the noise with mine, but I’m not going to make the same mistake again and let you borrow this fan.”

“Fair,” I say as he walks away.

The temperature’s fine for now but I can feel another heat wave coming. Maybe I should get up the couch and make another chocolate milk and make it cold this time.

…

I am doing work on the Lord’s Day, of all of days. This is what happens when you put off to today what you could have done yesterday. But in my defense, I was feeling a weird vibe yesterday. I woke up too early, which gave me energy in all the wrong ways. Energy in everything except for work. Using my work laptop to scroll through social media and cast music videos on my TV. Taking the occasional food run despite a fridge full of dessert.

It was a miracle that I could stay awake until 11, when the basketball game ended.

Dinner for last night was a shawarma I couldn’t eat but a chocolate cake – the second this week – that I could. I washed it down with some Sleemans. The regular ones and not the light ones since Gary made fun of me for picking the light ones and then picking on me some more after putting them back the wrong way.

Anyway, back to today. Before I get some work done - dinner. Heated chocolate on top of long biscuits. Who says dinner has to have meat?

It’s a miracle I’m getting work done this day and this late. A guy messaged me on an app and told me that he was available to have a quick date.

I even bragged about it to Gary. I told him I needed to borrow his fan, which he allowed.

“Quick clean-up?”

“Of course! He’ll be here in twenty minutes, he said. The whole apartment is clean – thank you for that, by the way. The only thing I need to clean is my body,” I said I went to his room to take the fan.

I stepped off the washroom, wet hair, fully clothed. Every part of me is shaved.

“What’s up,” Gary asked. He was sitting with Rashad.

“I checked my phone when I stepped off the shower and I saw that his messages weren’t there anymore. His profile wasn’t there anymore neither.”

‘Are you ok?”

“Yeah, at least I had an excuse to shower today.”

“Grab a beer.”

I opened the fridge and got my tumbler where I poured my beer, storing it there before I stepped into the shower.

When I say down on my couch Gary had two bowls of chocolate flavored chips. One for himself and one for me. I have no idea whether I do enough things for him, but he at least does things like this for me. And the fan too. Ok he does make fun of me sometime but the good overweighs the nitpicks.

I ate each chip while sipping my beer, the second beer of the day and the third drink. I had rum in between beers. My work might become more incoherent as day turned into technical night but it’s not like any of this work matters. Some baseball highlight show is on. Watch me put some baseball lingo while working on something that has at least 9% sports content.

…

Last night was sports, tonight is going to be a Netflix and chill by myself kind of day. A romantic movie, and the only way that can help me wash down this kind of cornball is with another chocolate cake.

Someone asked last night on Reddit why eating well doesn’t feel different but eating bad automatically does, and it’s kinda true. This was my second slice of the day. I had one during my last break while working from home, and I started feeling a little tightness in my chest. I had to belch some out between calls.

After slice number two, I had the same feeling, but I can also feel my abdomen giving out like a hernia. I switch between massaging my chest and the area between my guys and my crotch. Thank God I’m not doing this in public. All it takes is a few snaps from my chest. The feeling never goes away but my body just moves on from one pain into another. A loud noise that will make me not sleep. A short sleep stat starts in the morning and ends when my alarm goes off, which is when exactly?

Gary leaves his bedroom to go to the kitchen.

“Can I have some of your cake,” he asks.

“Only if you give me a slice too.”

My wish was his command a few seconds later. I devour the slices, more like breathe them in, disregarding the flavour and belching air out.

…

Another sleepless night. It’s that thing where I sleep on my neck and shoulder wrong for years, eventually destroying my body. Maybe eating more might make my body ignore the pain. Another slice of chocolate cake might give me the sugar crash I’ve been waiting for my entire life.

Sleep is surrender, a risk we daily take, a gamble whether we wake up the next day. It’s either that or die painfully or live like a vegetable, a 1% brain perpetually awake inside a 99% dead body.

Will a minor snap on my shoulders take away the pain or just remind me of it? Or will the air leaving just be the first bubbles of many until the last one. Scratching the crust on my eyes – how does my body make those even though I’m awake – will remove it finally or will only make some more to scratch away.

Eating another slice then walking back to my bedroom doesn’t take away that phantom flavour in my mouth like a dancing ghost. My left arm starts to numb slightly, so I try to lie down and sleep it off. The cold air doesn’t stop the hot temperature from leaving my body or is it just two temperatures fighting each other like clouds I build around me, invisible ones. I want the peace of my stomach to travel up my brain. I want for the final sleep.