Pocket Lint

This is going to be a story about food. About how it's all that I think about, and about how it's always been that way. 

About how I shoved sticks of string cheese in my jeans, picked the crumby pocket lint off of them, and chomped into them like greasy stadium hot dogs. About how my parents would pat me down for food, like it was a some vibrating home-made bomb, before I was allowed to leave the kitchen. About how I lied to my friends about being thirsty, just to get the chance to go to the kitchen and eat their parents' Olive Garden leftovers. 

About how a little peach-fuzz girl got left alone before school most mornings, about how fear-induced voices wormed out from the grout between the kitchen tiles of her parents' big new house. About how she crammed cool ranch Doritos into her mouth to shut them up, about how she let the crunching sound form paint-layer after paint-layer over each panicked inhale, about how she scrambled to get rid of the evidence when she heard the garage door rumble open and her mom's Impala drive up. 

About how desperate she was to blindly vacuum anything between her sprinkle-covered lips, about how ironic it was that she was filling herself up with something that would only make her feel emptier.

About how it's all that I think about, and about how it's always been that way.