Why is it so hard to lose weight?

   It is a lifelong challenge that I have simply been unable to overcome on my own volition. Even now, as I draft this random piece of writing, I have instinctively opened a packet of thin, sodium chloride-coated potato crisp crackers. My right forefinger and thumb are conspiring against the unimaginable slim me from a distant future that is becoming so distant that even a fashion magazine on a bench in Paris is more visible from the other side of the world than a respectable number on a scale that I’m standing on. I am what Isabella Caro could have only dreamed of, though her nightmare is my dream. I am the bully, and bulimia is my victim, and the only thing that I vomit is the will to shed off excess calories that no number of McDonald’s chains could keep up with. This is not to say that I have never been a decent figure. But that fleeting moment – so brief that even a mayfly won’t be envious of – was not the product of sheer will but of a natural order of events, so natural that it would even make a sociopath empathetic.

    It’s hard not to lose weight in the military. A particular moment comes to mind. As someone who did more than dip a toe in the ocean of decorum throughout his life due to the teachings of his mother, his polar opposite, despite the presence of higher-ranking military personnel in the room, my eyes fixed themselves on the box of Dunkin’ Donuts like a famished vulture looking intensely at its prey. The box brought in by the kind sergeant on a Friday morning was full of glazed donuts, not doughnuts, enticing like opium was to the Chinese in the 19th century, like the smartphone to today’s generation. All I can say is that I was a lowly private, but a single donut was not all I devoured that moment. A different facade, but the same soul.

    Yet, this snapshot of a fat film became manure for the tree of vanity to shamelessly root itself deep into the heart of the retrograde amnesiac. It was only apt for a man once so thick to have thick skin. Alas, old habits returned as surely as migrating birds drawn back by the familiar comfort, and the transient chapter gave the ink no time to dry.

    All that remains is a piece of glorified memory trapped in a frame that does not show the whole picture.

    I know that Earth is flat.

    What’s for dinner?

    It’s midnight.

    munch