As I lathered up in the shower this morning, my eye caught a suspiciously large wart on the thumb of my left hand. Panic surged. My mind spiraled into a vortex of doom: How could this happen just three days before my wedding? I haven’t had a wart in 25 years! How fast does Compound W work? Is it too late to buy bridal gloves? And, if I do, how on earth will Mr. P manage to slip the ring on my finger?
Then, clarity hit. The wart wasn’t a wart at all—it was a soap bubble. And just like that, I realized I’m losing it.
For the past week, my cravings have been utterly deranged. Not for some amorphous indulgence, but for very specific junk foods. Yet, I’ve dutifully adhered to my usual policy of avoiding anything my great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. Breakfast has been toast with Neufchâtel, though my heart longs for a big, neon bowl of Fruity Pebbles. At lunch, I chop through salads, bread, and hummus while daydreaming about a buttery mound of spaghetti with just salt and butter. (Granted, my great-great-grandmother probably wouldn’t have known what hummus was, but surely someone’s did.) I snack on plums to quell an ache for Doritos and Reese’s Pieces. At night, I’ll sit down to a rustic French dinner with a modest cheese course, but I’m secretly dying for something deep-fried and lacquered in sweet-and-sour sauce, capped off with Ben & Jerry’s featuring chocolate-covered pretzels.
Today, I finally caved. I marched to a cafeteria-style lunch spot in downtown Boston, the kind of place that caters to construction workers and unrepentant carb enthusiasts. My coworker calls it the “Quantity Café” because, well, they prioritize quantity over quality. I was the lone customer without a bike messenger’s neon vest or an industrial neck tattoo. My eyes hovered over the gooey, doughy pizza—sold by the quarter-pie—but I opted for the cheese lasagna instead.
Lasagna! My long-lost love. I walked out of the Quantity Café clutching a $4 slab of lasagna the size of my forearm. To fit into the takeout container, they’d sliced it into two pieces. Who knew that layers of ricotta and mozzarella pressed between overcooked noodles and practically void of tomato sauce could be so… satisfying? Not nourishing—let’s not kid ourselves—but deeply satisfying. For the first time in a week, I felt calm. Perhaps because my blood sugar promptly tanked, leaving me too drained to worry about whether all those empty calories were heading straight to the backs of my upper arms.
