She had an appetite for hunger. It’s how she fed herself; she didn’t. She didn’t want to; her friends didn’t either. To them, exclusively, I was the essence of gluttony; they’d think I was sinning, yet who were the ones who were walking dead?
And I asked, “What are the wages?”

That food inside my gastric chamber---was puffed up. I thought it would be a plus; quite nourishing. She thought I needed purging, or rather, purgatory. She told me I was gorging myself with the substances of all things vain. Thing was, she really believed she was gorgeous, but all anyone could see was her veins.

We were too hungry; hungry for things, unfulfilling.

We fought. She complained I wasn’t enough of a help. There was always too much on her plate. I felt the guilt so I would clean slate; take her out on a dinner date. It just wasn’t enough. I went with my gut; my eyes had been too large the whole time. Somewhere I needed to narrow down my expectations.

On the other hand, my babe was narrow-minded with a shrunken vision; eyes too small to perceive the depth of her true beauty, but in her mirror image---she was bad to the bone. It was a paradoxical dilemma between us that began to grow; it divided us. Somehow we ended up on opposite sides of the scale.

To make a long story short; we broke up.
I bet I know, now, what the wages are.










Five years have passed since then. I’m surprised she hasn’t seen the light; but life lends me burdens so heavy these days. It warms me to know she found herself a caretaker; he’s infatuated with her body image.

My new girl tells me I’m never too big or too fat for her, at least she sees things normally, strange. I don’t even know what my body looks like. I keep my head up…or maybe it’s just because my chin won’t let it down.

These days, my ex-girlfriend is just as fulsome to her “friends”, as I am full among mine own.
Full of what? Ourselves? Maybe so.
Emptied of her? Yes; yet the both of us still panting for that nourishment.

God, the wages of those fruits, that whole tree, this entire garden; now inducing such sick dreams; one of the fat calf and the other, of the slim; sickening---the digestive decision that wrought this profound famine.
It has twisted our vision and torn us apart; daily still doing so. Such is this invisible sea of roiling hedonism which caters to all of us so reprehensibly well; the bottomless void in which each and every heart lies; the weightiness of our hunger, constantly corrupted by the vanity of our inevitable appetites.
Open for business is a pantry of petty, paltry self-desires eating away at all of us in anomalous ways; the biggest losers.
Won’t anybody judge me, now? Someone kill these horrible fantasies. I’m so over the main course.
Where is a waiter? I need another menu for “just desserts”…
And when I’m done…burst my bubble and just tell me---what the wages are.