I couldn’t eat because my body said so because my brain said so because my body said so. This was a concern but not a dire one. The word dire had become consumed by things like forgetting my umbrella at the store. If it started to rain while I was on the bus, for example, I would get off at my intended stop and wait for the next one home. Whatever I had intended on doing was cancelled. I could try to be again tomorrow.

The word dire was contained in all objects and once activated by my touch the direness would explode all over me. The first time this happened, it was a surprise. Though messy, I could clean it up fine. But after a while, it became too exhausting to clean up only to have to clean myself all over again moments later. So I walked around covered in dire all the time until it became far too embarrassing and far too exhausting. I stopped touching as many things as I could. I stopped leaving my apartment and after I while I never left bed at all.

Sometimes I’d think I should try to do something about the dire. I would think about it like a riddle. The dire was stuck on everything and so it was also stuck on nothing. This was a help and a curse. Whatever the dire was made of, I couldn’t exactly tell, but I knew it was permanent. Maybe it soaked through my skin or I caught a breath of it that went up my nose. However it got in became irrelevant because the dire had started to metastasize. It was in my brain and it seemed to spread to my gastrointestinal tract, though I wasn’t sure how literal that spread was. Sometimes the idea of a thing is more threatening than the thing itself. I can never tell who’s in charge and who’s just in cahoots.

The Someone in charge of my eating had decided to liquidate that department. Closed down. Nothing in or out. For two months I couldn’t eat a thing. Sometimes a spoonful of broth would touch my lips and we’d try to work together, the Someone and I. Figure this thing out. We’d sit and we’d sit waiting for the other to make the first move. But my tongue was in cahoots too, and by the first drop of broth, my tongue told my brain no, we will not be welcoming this or anything today. By December, I weighed under 100 pounds.

I spent most of my time alone with my body. This wasn’t by choice, or maybe it was. I could never tell who was in charge and who was in cahoots. My apartment had cold tiled floor that I would walk across barefoot from my dark bedroom to the fluorescent kitchen where I could see in to the other dark and empty bedrooms. I lived with roommates, but never saw them. They were present only in their material traces. Their rumpled sheets and filling garbage cans. There wasn’t much to look at, but I liked to take an inventory of the place every day as my daily walk. Two chairs there. One table there. One desk there.

But on this day there was something new. An eleven-pound Nutella jar sat atop the fridge, the biggest I’d ever seen. My brain would say a roommate had bought it, but the Someone in charge knew better. The jar had simply appeared. I didn’t have to scan it for dire. Its presence was too miraculous, too angelic.

The Someone grabbed the jar with my two hands and sat me down on the floor where they gripped the jar between my thighs. The Someone ripped off the seal and stared down into it. It looked like Nutella. I hadn’t seen her in years. It was good to see her face again. And from her face, something other than dire wafted up my nose, who told my brain to tell my hand about an idea it had, a good one in fact. I watched my hand plunge into the Nutella jar with the urgency of someone who’s doing something important and take out an oozing handful. And I watched my hand shove the Nutella towards my mouth, turning it into a mouthful, a faceful even. I thought about Winnie-the-Pooh as I chewed, Nutella smeared across my eyebrows.

I was starving again. Handful after handful turned into mouthful after faceful. Globs of Nutella landed in my hair and ears and mouth and stomach and intestines and blood and brain and heart. And for a few hours it soaked deeper than the dire and peeled it right off.