Day 74

Silent. Silent as terra cotta soldiers in a tomb. Silent in a drawer in my desk but more dangerous than any army of clay warriors.

For a month I have had a bag of Reese's peanut butter cups in my drawer. They whisper to me. I resist. They persist. I am Bilbo and the ring is on the mantlepiece. Or is it?

Today I decided I would have one. Just one for they were the large holiday size. One. How bad could one peanut butter cup be? It's really not that different from a protein bar, is it? No, one can't hurt even if it is one of the large holiday shapes. But is one really correct? It takes two to make a whole candy bar sized piece, so I'll have two.

But now the bag was open. There is only one real way to remove the temptation of an open bag of peanut butter cups. I would just have to get rid of them somehow. Should I give them away? Surely not, it was B day and none of the children deserved them. My comprehensive law class watched me slowly peel one after the other and shove them into my already satisfied gullet. Did they try to stop me? Did they offer an intervention? No. Why should I share with children so callous as to allow me to disregard my safety? So I sat at my desk eating peanut butter cups like a tiger shark eats seagulls, or poor swimmers. One after the other until the bag was gone.

Shame. I rarely feel it. I know it exists, but I try to ignore the biting sting of it, as if I were swatting away midges. Today the shame was real. Not only did I eat an entire bag of oversized peanut butter cups, I did it AFTER I finished my breakfast. My large breakfast. And an hour before my lunch. My lunch was an entire barbecued ribeye steak. I knew it was waiting for me and I ate them all anyway. I looked at the empty bag the way Anakin Skywalker looked at the room of Jedi younglings after his attack.

I know my weakness. I am the man that once did this, and not for irony, but because I honestly thought it was a good idea. IT WAS!

Now I am more monster than man, and more peanut butter than flesh. And in the minute before I left school today, another teacher approached me with left over potato wedges from Publix. A whole crate of them. Several pounds!

I took them home and put them in the air fryer. What is wrong with me? Truly I have been to the crossroads and I have walked away without my soul.