Hungry Hungry Tapeworm

When I was in high school I was convinced I had a tapeworm. While I’d heard of things like body image and eating disorders, nothing around could satiate Toby (my worm). Toby taunted me the most earnestly after dinner. I’d snack all afternoon, trying to fill Toby’s expansive innards. Dinner would roll around and I’d eat for the two of us. But after dinner, Toby would start a riot, demanding more and more goods and a sugary nightcap ending note in the form of dark chocolate and peanut butter.

I noticed that I was consuming more food than my friends. I’d sit quietly on the edge of the blob of us girls that gathered for lunch and I’d gobble up the healthy lunch Mom had packed for me. Then I would have to wait for all the other dainty, girl-eaters to pick through their food and decide what would “like, totally make them fat.” They would discard these items by pushing them to the edge of the ring where I happened to be waiting like a dog under the dinner table. I’d finish their French-fries, Sunchips, and assorted treats by lil Debbie. Then all the girls would place their delicate little hands over their empty bellies and say something like, “OMG I’m sooooo full!!!!” which I noted must be biomedically impossible. Meanwhile my fat fists were tearing through plastic packaging that was only a barrier I had to overcome by Toby’s demand.

I was larger than all of my friends. Taller, wider, and stronger. They had tiny, feminine frames and I felt like a real bruiser standing next to them. I became concerned about my girth sometime around sixteen and started running at night to ward off the effects of Toby’s appetite. The running did not make me smaller and seemed to only enliven Toby’s enthusiasm, forcing me to have a bowl of cereal before bed most nights. I assumed Toby would be with me forever, like a scar or a bad memory or that bit of shrimp I still have lodged deep in my left shin. So Toby and I loaded up and left for college where we were poisoned by school cafeteria food. (I’m not being dramatic. It later came out that our school food was being pumped with preservatives that the human body cannot breakdown.) Toby and I, and all the other art school nitwits, would come out of the cafeteria feeling hungrier than we did when we went in. Jared and I had a routine of eating the poison food as a base layer and then walking over to Panera and filling up on bread rolls so that we would not feel the hunger pangs as sharply when the school food finished it’s air raid on our intestines. The War of Lower Digestion took many a pounds from me, six of which, I decided, were Toby the Tapeworm. We lost Toby in combat.

Lately I’ve been really hungry right after dinner, just like I was in high school. It made me think of Toby and how I was truly concerned that something was wrong with my appetite. I even dared think that Toby has resurrected himself, a stronger, mutant tapeworm, patiently waiting for a nightcap bowl of cereal.