comfort food

She sits there eating cookie after cookie, crème wafers covered in milk chocolate, chunky chocolate chip, double stuffed oreos, the chocolate covered kind that is sometimes hard to find in the stores. After two Italian subs, half a meatball, half a veal, and a whole eggplant (because the vegetables balances the diet, you know), all parmesan with double cheese and extra sauce (because she is so very oral, you know), and she is looking forward to the midnight snack, the two halves she did not just eat. It is only just after eight o'clock, after all, and she always has a snack before bed. The prime time hours have just begun, her favorite time of the day, so she has her snack tray laid out around her and she's making the great escape into other people's lives and carbohydrate heaven.

He knows how to be healthy, he's done it before, after all, as a former marathon runner and almost Olympian, yet he sits at his computer writing about his life, complaining mostly, because he must have given up on his dreams somewhere along the way, at least temporarily, long enough to pack on fifty pounds, much against his medical advice, and lose any connection with a social life, except for the messages on his computer. As midnight approaches, he drinks another Red Bull so he can continue on into the night, writing, writing, writing out his life, pouring out the loose thoughts and careless emotions that remain after whatever it was that shut him down and drove him to this, a shut-in existence linked to the outside world only by the umbilical cordless mouse-ball he ordered on the internet where he taps on into the night feeling like the king of his cyber kingdom.

They are two lost souls living in a fishbowl of electronic compassion, real as they want it to be. Her phone rings, she ignores it. The best part of her favorite episode is on and she must see it for the seven or eight hundredth time, year after year.

There's a knock at his door, he ignores it. He is on a roll and nothing can stop his fingers now for they are tapping out the symphony of his imaginary existence.

They are content, or at least numb, which is a form of contentment, I suppose.