WITH YOUR BOYFRIEND, something urgent is always happening. Maybe he’s in a fight with his best friend, or someone at his job got murdered and he’s got a lead on the killer, or he has a project due at 8 a.m. and he’s overslept, or he’s pretty sure someone is following him everywhere he goes, but he can’t talk about it. Some days you only see your boyfriend at meals, but he never gets to eat, much less have a conversation. He gets a call when the fork is halfway to his mouth. He gets a text just as he’s folding his slice of pizza in half. He cuts a neat triangle from his waffle and just then, someone bursts through the door with news.
When your boyfriend calls out for delivery, he asks for two cheeseburgers, extra fries, a side of the special chili, macaroni and cheese with extra cheese, fried pickles. At breakfast he asks for waffles, sausage, biscuits and gravy, a spinach and feta omelet, extra bacon, breakfast tacos, mini blueberry muffins. He always orders two pizzas instead of one, extra breadsticks with his lasagna, he always tells the waiter he wants an appetizer. He orders all this food and then he can’t eat it because he is called away. He is running toward something or he is running away from something. He is dropping his fork to rush out the door; he is drop ping a full cup of frozen yogurt to melt as he runs down the street.
Your boyfriend’s hunger is magnified, legendary. He can’t eat even when he tries. When he lifts a fork to his mouth, even an empty fork, an alarm goes off somewhere in the distance. He knows he’s the only one who can solve these problems, from the minor crisis to the major catastrophe. He has to be there to stop the nuclear plant from melting down. He has to be there to save his best friend’s marriage. In his wake he leaves a trail of solved problems, satisfied customers, citizens saved, and a trail of rot, a landfill’s worth of food waste, never eaten, the hollow inside him growing at an incredible rate even as he sometimes looks over his shoulder with longing.
Once, he ignored a crisis, tried to take a bite despite the alarm going off in the distance, and a second alarm went off, then more, a falling building in midtown, a tidal wave at the beach, a plane falling out of the sky, a civil war erupting across Europe, an entire landmass cracking off and falling into the sea, and as his tongue touched just the smallest bit of his ravioli, the sun went supernova, dooming the world billions of years from now, when the wave of fire finally reaches Earth.
He could never bring himself to do it again.
It is hard to say to him, you are always leaving me, but he is always leaving you, surrounded by piles of uneaten food, discarded, another thing he wants but dares not touch his mouth to. You are lonely among the worms and ants that emerge from hiding to pick at scraps of egg, the rare beetles hoping to steal a pepperoni, the birds flying away with dinner rolls and the rats nibbling at discarded cheeseburg ers. Here is what your boyfriend does not do: come back. Here is what you do not do: chase after him. Even though he leaves a trail you could easily follow, you are not a scavenger, and you don’t need anything from him.