Fries and a Diet Coke
Burger King is a warm gun bang bang shoot shoot
January 2020: It was my first time being home alone while experiencing the side effects of heartbreak. It is advised that devastation be titrated slowly, over the course of a few weeks, months—but not years, that can cause other complications. A large dose of devastation taken too quickly can lead to unpleasant side effects, one of which is death. No matter how many times we swallow the end, its taste doesn’t ever improve. Usually someone would be home to annoy me when the pangs began. The fanfare would get muffled by a distraction, a plea for a favor, criticism, a joke, and it couldn’t swell to announce the arrival of my loneliness.
A good remedy for being alone is often food, it’s the closest thing to a warm body. I had hope that the sustenance could be spun into a sticky-sweet gossamer of comfort. Delicate enough to brush past me, an eyelash flutter on my cheek. I would only know it existed if I stood very still.
11 PM: I pull up to Burger King with Diet Coke in mind. Diet Coke is composed of elements that have the potential to cure most maladies, at least temporarily. Its effervescent base rapidly and idiosyncratically distributes flavor, stimulating the sullen mind by commanding attention. It is sweetened with aspartame, an additive more addictive than sugar. Most importantly, it’s caffeinated. Stimulants are necessary, it’s even said that Voltaire drank 50-80 cups of coffee a day to fuel his manifestos. Our history with coffee ostensibly dates back to 850 a.d. Before being used as a daily luxury in the “upper class societies of Europe, Arabia, and Ming dynasty China,” it was valued for its medicinal qualities. Chugging a Diet Coke is a hybridized celebration of the two.
The tonic’s molecules work in frothy symbiosis: sweet caramel flavors are locked into tiny bubbles that get delivered to your mouth where, upon landing, they pop to reveal their contents. Aspartame’s sweetness is a blurry facsimile, a copy of a copy of a copy of sugar. Gum is known to take 7,000 years to digest, and aspartame endures in your mouth for the same amount of time. While waiting for the aftertaste to dissolve, you’ll remember that soda waxes heavy coatings, like oils and sweeteners, off the tongue. With each sip, the carbonation strips a layer of aspartame while dutifully laying down another.
Consumed by the phenomenon that transcends your car out of the parking lot, you might miss the caffeine starting to massage your brain, tucking clusters of vigor behind every groove, priming your body for something hot and greasy.
Today I wanted to take a chance on Burger King fries. Fries really are the warm-body food. Pizza can be too, but it’s such a liability. Like a person, fries are ideally soft, hot, and don a shell I can easily tear away. I wasn’t expecting to be impressed, but they were perfect. Crisp rinds encased warm potato pith. The insides remained fluffy even while heaving under ketchup’s wet weight. Salt enhanced the flavor with as many facets as each grain contained, and every bite caressed me in an embrace. I’d later learn that if you ask for your fries “well done,” you can get them that good every time.
I sat in the car for a while, I couldn’t believe it. I stopped paying attention to my podcast. Hot fry, slurp, hot fry, hot fry, slurp. It worked.
This is a rare feat. Sometimes you try to fill a void but get nauseated before your treat has successfully sedated you. This did the trick so well that I began doing it every week, or every time I felt sad. For a while, it was probably every night. I even continued after my parents returned from vacation. I briefly continued after I moved to Brooklyn, but my fast-food routine had lost some of its magic in the city. Fries don’t taste as good outside of a car and Burger King was really far from my apartment. A street is only a little more private than the subway.
Still, to keep tradition alive I’d take the opportunity to drive to Burger King for fries and a Diet Coke whenever I visited my parents. People have to commit to their rituals.
. . .
Even though the grief had once been potent enough to derail my life, it began to fade by the time I moved. Now, symbols of the past were misted through the city like smog. The air was in a state of temporary commemoration. I inhaled reminders as they plumed into the sky. I’d see him in people’s faces, I’d see him in the gaits of men wearing heavy parkas who, after turning around, revealed they were about 70 years old. I usually hold my breath when I pass a graveyard, but I had come around to getting possessed, I almost missed the ache. I didn’t know him well enough anymore to miss him, plus, I was really busy. I began moving like an automaton, clicking and whirring through my steps. A formula had been calculated and programmed into what I’d say when the topic of past relationships came up. I could recite without meaning. Eventually, I stopped craving French fries. I wished that weren’t the case. If I needed to rely on them for comfort then it meant this heartbreak had once existed, was still fresh—I wasn’t so far from the memory of having been loved. Maybe it also meant I could leap over some of the steps in my assembly line routines, pierce the structure, and rip through to whatever semblance of connection lay beyond.
Frequent retellings over the years metamorphose into this narrative; “It was like a divorce,” I begin, “drawn out...we were together for a like a year, or two, and then on and off for like three...it just took a while to fall apart, we never took space. I mean it was falling apart, but it took a while to formally end.”
Every time I tell it is an attempt to be more concise, a storyteller who can cut to the heart without feeling for a pulse. How can I condense five years of high highs and the lowest lows into evidence that somebody had once loved me? How can I tell the story in a way that proves I know how to love? To prove I’m able to do more than just get by, but even do a good enough job that my love has the power to transform?
How can I tell the story to manipulate you, if you know someone had once loved me then maybe you’ll feel comfortable loving me too.
Which part of the story can I use to extract a sinew that binds the translucent layers of my selves so they take the shape of something opaque and authoritative in their unity?
I attest to its authenticity by peppering the story with anecdotes: “he’d wait up for me by the phone every night,” “it was hard to let it go - he asked if we could still say ‘good morning’ the day after we broke up.” “Once he went down on me when my period was ending and when he came up, he chirped ‘tastes like pennies!’”
You know, I’m over it though, I have no baggage. I tell this to my dates,
You’re afraid? I’ve pushed through my fears. Unlike you. Even if that’s not fully true, it becomes part of the story and gets embedded in the history of the experience. History is what needs to be secured for something to be real.
“I was really upset with you, I was really mad about how mean you were...and the whole way here I was planning to go off on you. But now that I’m seeing you...I feel a bit cowed by your presence.” He confessed after I’d lashed out. It was years ago but I remember what I wore that day—a gingham, a-line midi skirt with a tight boatneck top, the hourglass look. My hair was loosely pulled back and I’d dabbed my cheeks with crimson lipstick.
I try to recreate this silhouette when I want to be respected. I put on a dress with a tie that cinches my waist as I get ready for a first date with someone I think I could also respect.
It goes really well! He just wants to sleep with me, close enough.
I say “I like you” to somebody new, and it’s something I’ve chosen to recite instead of tell. The simultaneous creation and confirmation of a version of the truth. What I think my truth has the potential to be. I learn to mouth the words and shove my voice through them. It’s not a lie, but I’m not divulging. It’s hard to remember where to reach in order to try. I know the world I’m describing exists, take my card—I’m good for it. Click-click-click while I bow into a plié, whirr when I straighten back up, the motor sputters upon completion.
They say you’re only truly able to complete an obstacle course if you can also do it blindfolded, balancing a book on your head, and maybe even while battling a fever. I don’t know who “they” are, they’re made up and haven’t been fleshed out yet, but I believe them. The obstacle course loses some of its nuance if you can’t see well enough to consider your movements, to change them with the environment, but the rigid repetition allows you to get good. It doesn’t do justice to people I’ve loved or to me, or to love. That’s because it’s not about love. It’s about being able to stretch a departure with only my hands.
