Lobster Hug

FEELING: The one where you’ve built an idea about the future like an intricate origami creature inside your chest, and slowly or suddenly the possibilities turn into impossibilities and for hours or days there’s a rustling in your rib cage as the complex structure destroys itself, unfolding and flattening, unfolding and flattening pleat by pleat.

HOW TO EAT IT: Maybe just like an entire loaf of bread. Put butter on it. Put anything you can find on it.

…

FEELING: The one where you realize you’ll never kiss a particular person again and even though it’s so trivial it feels like grief, it feels like someone has reached down your throat and is turning you inside out.

HOW TO EAT IT: Straight bourbon until you’re unconscious.

My Favorite:

FEELING: The one where you got too drunk at a party and all you want is one cigarette, and someone finds you a cigarette or you go across the street to the bodega to buy 18 cigarettes you’ll never smoke and two you will, and you’re standing slightly apart from everyone and letting the nicotine run down your nerves as the alcohol runs up and you close your eyes and the horizons rush outward until the world inside your head is many times bigger than the one outside, and small on the edge of that vast and incalculable blackness you can almost make out the image of something you want to be.

HOW TO EAT IT: Weird ice cream, maybe blood orange or cardamom. The whole thing. Don’t be coy. Also, go ahead and smoke the rest of those.