A Big Sad Plate Full of Carbs Meant to Comfort You

when all you really want is to hold hands

Chapter 69

Loving someone was so much easier in the before times when you could casually place your hand on a person you love and they would know that your touch meant “I love you. I am happier just being near you.”

You haven’t stopped loving people. You are still happier when you are near them, but your hands make you a little sad now. Somehow they’ve become dangerous, even though all they want to do is love. Seeing people, even though it is nice, also makes you sad now too.

Sometimes you think that this would all be easier if you just lived in the faraway somewhere where no one could reach you and you had no way to leave. At least then you wouldn’t have to have conversations about ways to be near other people that all make you feel so far away: smiling at each other from afar so that touch isn’t even an option, driving many hours just to look at someone’s face without being able to take it in your hands and tell them how much you’ve missed them, constantly unable to complete the circuit of skin that passes affection between you.

Maybe if you fill yourself with carbs it’ll be easier to just stop trying to go anywhere at all. That way you don’t have to see all the people that you cannot touch and your hands will not feel so useless.

So you fry up some sausage and boil pasta and then dump it all together with a jar of sauce and stir in some cheese and put more cheese on top and bake it in the oven at 400 degrees until it is browned and bubbling and too hot to touch anyway.

Comfort food is supposed to comfort you. If not, then why would anyone call it comfort anyway? You don’t feel comforted. Your hands don’t feel comforted. Eating more doesn’t help, though you do keep trying.

If there is magic in your body, you have always imagined it streaming from your palms. What good is this magic now? All you can do is stretch your palms out into the empty between you. Suddenly the only thing that your hands can communicate is the sadness in your distance, a line reaching out into the endless…