personal essay. Academic readers avoid.
My friend called me today as I was eating bread and honey. The honey was drizzled on the bread, like a peasant might do as a little treat. It was too sticky to eat with my hands, and I stabbed it with a fork and nibbled on it as I spoke with him.
He told that his long distance girlfriend deleted her account, quantum cucked him,1 and threatened suicide, so I bit down hard on the fork I was using and broke my tooth.
Even when I was an atheist, I began to interpret such events through a literary lens. God must be punishing me.
A broken tooth is an irreversible harm. You do something small, like bite down hard on a fork, and the tooth breaks, smashing a thin metal rod against a small beige rock. Teeth are just little rock deposits lodged in our mouths. The Chinese were right about chopsticks. There’s another metaphor in there.
I prefer the hard, steel, uncompromising metal fork over the soft, gentle, harmless Chinese chopstick. And now I am being punished.
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