I Want Bread

“Are you hungry?”

I looked around to figure out where the voice was coming from. The room was cold and I could see my breath coming out white. I hugged myself and rubbed my arms, realizing that I was chilled to the bone. My fingers were red and my forearms suddenly grew goosebumps, as if my body has been using sleep to keep warm and was just now learning that it had forgotten to distinguish dream from reality.

“Who’s there?” I called out. My voice echoed and I listened to it evaporate into a foreign abyss. Why couldn’t I see where I was? There was light coming from all sides and the floor was luminous too. I felt that I might as well be blind, for all I could see was my own body and nothing else, as if I was under a microscope. A wave of fear washed over me and I shivered, allowing my teeth to make a chattering sound in the vacuum-like silence.

I put my hand in front of my face, hoping to block some of the light. The fingernails of my left hand pinky and ring fingers had gone blue, just as they used to do when I was sick. In those days, to address the cold, I would have wrapped myself in a comforter and microwaved some bone broth and cayenne in a mug to bring to bed. I would sip the broth, letting it warm my chest, and then curl into a fetal position until the heat from my upper body finally spread to my legs and icy feet. I’d put the blanket over my head so that my breath could warm my nose. No amount of radiant heat could have changed my condition then and there was nothing to be done now either. No blanket, no broth, no bed, just that voice that had spoken from somewhere deep inside this clinical abyss.

My pupils started to adjust to the abundance of light. I knew I was seeing normally now and did not need to squint, but there was nothing to be seen, only the color white, this sterile light, and my own flesh. My veins seemed to beam neon blue under goose-pimpled, quivering skin and I gasped when I saw that I was wearing my ex’s old T-shirt that he had tie-dyed himself when he was a kid. Why would I be wearing that? He was not my most recent ex or even the one before that, and no, I definitely had not kept that shirt, which was too much his for me to take. Not to mention, the relationship was plagued by a sort of casual quality that I couldn't bear and so ended abruptly and without any sentimentality.

“Hello? Tom?” I questioned the air, hoping to find my ex there with some explanation for where I was or how I’d gotten there and why I was wearing his shirt.

The last thing I remembered before waking in this space was making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich after getting home from teaching a few kids singing lessons. I was psyched about the sandwich because I had just opened a jar of this organic blueberry jam that I slathered onto a slice of also just-purchased super low carb, protein rich seeded power grain bread. I liked that sort of thing now. I had traveled a great distance from the days of bone broth and cayenne, which incidentally were from the Tom period. Interesting…

I started to rub my bare legs vigorously to generate warmth. The air in the room felt like that of an ice rink or walk-in freezer. It felt medicinally fresh and reminded me of how Tom used to keep his apartment around 63 degrees year-round, swearing that it was great for lungs and a deterrent for all sorts of respiratory illness like allergies or cancer. I think he was more than a little worried about the effects of his smoking habit on his health. That was okay because at the time I was afraid that my coldness was caused by some sort of fungus that slowed my blood pressure to nearly 55/45, so I was obsessed with sterile environments and home remedies too.

My attention came back to the present moment. Nobody is answering me. Nobody is here. There is nothing here but me. I am so cold and my limbs are going numb. I do pushups. Now burpees. Jumping jacks. Run around and bump into walls I can’t see because I am in a room that is not a room. I can’t stand the sensation of not feeling parts of my body. I am getting sleepy. This can’t last forever, can it?

The pushups reminded me of my ex after Tom, Liam. Liam was an unofficial Reiki healer who cured me of the cold. He said he did it with love. He would or could not elaborate and I couldn’t ask any questions that had any answers. All I could do was appreciate the warmth he brought and be afraid of losing it. 

“Is anyone there?” I shouted. My voice echoed and I knew that it was because the room went up and up and up forever.

Any time I would spend time away from Liam I would see this commercial for Peloton come up on YouTube or the television. I don’t remember if the commercials had always been there, but I do know I started noticing them more. Liam used to say, “hey, I don’t like the Peloton either but...”. He’d say this in various contexts and I never quite knew what he meant; he would always mention it in passing and had a way of glossing over what he did not want to define. I only knew that it was significant in some way and that the Peloton commercials were always a reminder of this concept or principle that was being drilled into my subconscious.

After we broke up, I started running almost every day because I didn’t want to fear or provide an excuse for the cold to come back. It had worked for a year and eventually I allowed myself to slack off without the fear of "turning back into a pumpkin". Now it was almost three years since then—I stayed warm even when it was cold and no longer found myself disabled with blue fingernails and needing to resort to soup, fetal positions, and forced sleep. And now this.

“Are you hungry?”

My body jerked about three inches off of the floor where I had been rocking back and forth, covering my knees with my hair and blowing into my hands. The voice sounded digital, like the amalgamation of several male voices into one. 

“Who are you? Show yourself! How dare you keep me here!” I replied hysterically because I did not know how long I had been in this space and my body was in pain, contorted and seized up by the deep freeze in my bones.

“I asked, are you hungry?” The voice was still digital and therefore lacked emotion, but the words themselves seemed menacing. I felt bullied and became less scared and more irritated.

“I am not hungry as much as extremely uncomfortable because I’ve been brought to this foreign place and the temperature is much too low for someone without sufficient clothing or covering. Please tell me where I am. I am scared and I feel I have been kidnapped or abducted by aliens or maybe I died and am in purgatory. Please tell me what is going on and if you plan to return me to my home.”

The disembodied voice asked, “Would you like some tea? Or maybe some broth?”

Again, I felt an anger swell inside of me. Was this robot trying to force me back into the Tom-era box? Was “he” trying to take away the experience I had with Liam? Was this thing punishing me for outrunning my past? Was it telling me it can’t be done? Was it telling me that I am not allowed to be healed? Was he telling me that my healing was false? Was it telling me that cold and sick is what I really am? Was he shoving me back into my own body? Is this my body as if I had never met Liam? Am I being judged? Sentenced? Imprisoned? Tested?

All of these questions bubbled as I boiled at the prospect of being made to go back to sick. That beautiful warm body that Liam had liberated with love, that I had fought to understand, worked to keep, and then accepted as my own, now being seized by this machine abductor and tortured into submission-- I cannot allow! Submission to this definition of me-- who I am, how I feel, and most importantly, what I eat? No, no, this will not fly. For a moment the anger warmed my chest and I felt like fighting back.

Fighting what? Fighting who? Fighting how?

“Perhaps you would like a warming soup,” said the voice of maybe 1,000,000 men.

I shivered and as my body convulsed, I laughed because despite all of my self-nurturing instincts to ask for the warm soup and the hot tea, I had to say, “No, thank you. I want bread.”