Hunger pulled at my viscera and the nausea that followed twisted me into knots. They shook me and found me awake, gazing at the red LED “2:13 a.m.” My cat Mona had come to check on me—maybe I was groaning before I woke from the hunger pangs. With all fourteen pounds of her chunkiness, her paws slowly pressed into my abdomen like too-dull juice-box straws attempting to pierce the foil.
I rolled out of bed, embracing the piercing ache in my lower back. My knees creaked to remind me: You’re in your 30s now. And it’s all downhill from here. My wife always tells me, “Downhill is easier anyway!” So down I go. This morning, I found that peanut butter was the answer.
I stumbled to the kitchen, tripping over inside-slippers and cat-shaped shadows lurking. A glob of extra-crunchy peanut butter on a 60-calorie slice of Dave’s Killer Bread will sate me. My entrails unraveled and a paste of peanut butter and multi-grain bread made me whole again. Hunger and nausea departed and a profound mental health crisis ensued—What the fuck did I write in everyone’s yearbook?
I washed my hands until the whorls of my fingertips pruned. Water crept up my arms and seeped into me, swelling my skin. I became bloated like a corpse washed up at a riverbend with other junk. I washed until the hot water ran out, and I felt guilty and wasteful. As clean and bloated as I became—what the fuck—what the fuck did I leave with everyone I don’t know anymore?
Everyone I knew and everyone I’ve forgotten has a piece of me I will never have back. Was it HAGS? Or just a signature for someone I didn’t care to write for? Or did I write too much and they wished I hadn’t so the people that actually mattered had space? And if I collected all these pieces and stuck them all together, would it even be me? A piece of bloated corpse for everyone, and I will never know who I was.
I remember the story of Osiris and how he was chopped into fourteen pieces and scattered across Egypt. His sister-wife Isis recovered all of the pieces to resurrect him. Except for his penis, which was eaten by a fish in the Nile. Osiris was green so maybe they thought it was a sea cucumber.
I wonder if my ankles were in someone’s cabinet. My nipples in a jewelry box in a Public Storage. I wonder if my nerves were all tangled up into a ball and stuffed into a junk drawer.
I wonder who fed my dick to a fish.