Day Five of Fast

I fasted for the first time last week. I will not share all of the writing that I've done during that time but here is a peek.

Day 5 of Fast

I’ve been having intense cravings for McDonald’s all morning. I found myself experiencing one of those quick thoughtless thoughts and almost looked over at my partner and said “Come on. Let’s get some breakfast.” This feeling lasts only for a moment and so after I have snapped back into reality, I ask myself “What the hell is wrong with you?”. I haven’t had beef in over five years! So why can I taste a warm cheesy double cheeseburger with ketchup, mustard, pickles and a little dehydrated onions and tomato? Why I am obsessing over this desire for french fries. No bump that, I want a stack of hot, white, enriched flour pancakes soaked in butter with warm maple syrup, hot turkey sausage, kinda seared-burnt on one side…you know the kind that comes in those two long rolls, some cheesy eggs and processed orange juice on the side. Now I feel sick just envisioning this meal. Back and forth I go. My past is here in my mouth.

I think the source of these food desires is that I forget I’m fasting. I’m not hungry. There are no intense hunger pains, no fatigue. I feel great. Though my body feels hetep my mind won’t let up. There are things, toxins, and trace elements of some junk that are clearly etched in me. When I was fourteen I worked at McDonalds. It was my first job and I was ecstatic. I lied to management and told them I was seventeen in order to get $6.15 an hour instead of $5.15 and also to have access to the grill where I could concoct my own savory designs. I ate more McDonalds in the six months that I worked there, than anyone should eat in their entire life. As a child I thought McDonalds was the most fantastical meal there was. McDonald’s trumped Popeye’s, McDonalds trumped Pizza Hut, McDonalds even trumped Red Lobster. I didn’t eat there often, only on rare occasions. My father would park up the street during a custody dispute so that my mother was not aware. He took us to McDonalds for breakfast before dropping us off at school. I would order my absolute favorite, a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit with a hash brown that if I could I would trade in for another sandwich and orange juice that if I could I would trade in for another sandwich. I devoured it in this awesome bliss. Yum for the crispy, flakey, white, artificially buttery biscuit topped with fake, plastic eggs and who knows what, when or where cheese and of course that crisp, bottom of the bottom, bred in the filthiest of slaughtering facilities, swine.

I write like this, making sure to break illusion and point out the folly, to make myself feel better about my cravings. McDonalds, with their little chemicals that they disguise as food and other addiction forming devices, has done some fucked up shit. I can’t even look at a deep, bright yellow right now without craving a breakfast sandwich. I was looking through pictures of a friend and realized that Neo Soul makes me crave McDonalds! I glanced at a television yesterday. There was a Pillsbury commercial that just hypnotized me. The doughboy, that soft, misshaped bringer of all that is evil about whiteness, is strangely seductive.

The good thing about all of this is that Queen Afua, in one of the books/workbooks I have read, states that the things we crave during fasting are the things that are leaving our bodies. I am releasing.