Regular Day

She did her laundry that day. It was a Tuesday night and there were less than ten people in the laundromat. While she watched the machine whir, her clothes going round and round inside, she heard her stomach made its own whir. She hasn’t had proper lunch that day because of all the demanding tasks and demanding people that wanted her attention, including the impending doom of what might be the results of her CAT scan on Saturday. Her mom left her a voicemail of worry, asking her to call back and discuss what the doctor said. For days, she has nursed a craving for a ramen in a cup. That was what she slurped in the tiny window of her lunch break around 2 o’ clock. The soup was a good blazing hot, much needed for the cold outside and the cold brewing her insides.

While waiting for her clothes to finish in the washer, she crossed the street to the supermarket. She was lured by every counter, every aisle, everything junk and not. She grabbed a basket and threw in a jar of peaches, a bottle of honey-roasted peanuts, a bag of imported pork cracklings, Oscar Meyer hotdogs, and the essential milk and eggs. Even the dollar-bag gummy worms beside the cashier counter did not escape her sight. She put it all in the basket and paid $30 for that impulsive trip. People say don’t go grocery-shopping with an empty stomach, but she probably knows that already. She was in her own hungry world to give a crap.

She threw all her dry and clean clothes in the Bed, Bath, & Beyond plastic bag, which she turned into her official laundry bag. She put three weeks worth of clean clothes in her trolley and pulled it onto the sidewalk. Pulling the rack of clothes on one hand and carrying the bag of groceries on the other, she walked an uphill battle back home with the cold winter wind blowing in her face. Inside her head, she was hoping the eggs wouldn’t drop and break. Those were organic cage-free eggs and it would have been a sad waste.

All she could think of was what she would eat first when she reached home. She took a handful of peanuts and started munching away. Mrs. Norma called her for dinner. They were having steamed shrimp. She wasted no time, took a bowl of rice, and grabbed a handful from the bowl of shrimp. She went for a second serving of steamed rice. She wasted no shrimp parts. How hungry could she be?

After dinner, she decided to finish off with peaches for dessert, made green tea and poured milk on it. She was still in the mood to eat some more, so she opened the bag of gummy worms. Something was messing with her appetite tonight.

She was all kinds of a mess the whole day. Feeling happy one minute and sad the next. Feeling excited one minute, depressed the next. She was hungry and tired and nothing could have shaken all of those weird feelings. That was what a regular day in her week looked like, a day that has become a regular part of her life and it was inescapable.