"I trust I shall not eat long at your expense, sir." ~ Jane Eyre

For the past few weeks, breakfast at my desk has gone something like this: my oatmeal sits half eaten and bits of strawberries begin to congeal into the oats as I stare into the plastic bowl and think about how hungry I am but am not really that hungry. I hold my spoon in vain for another minute as I stare into the oat-laden abyss until I get completely fed up and toss both the bowl and my spoon into the trash can. I sip some more of my French vanilla flavored coffee, but can’t really finish that either since I feel my feet fidget underneath my desk an know that drinking more of my beloved java will exacerbate their movement even more so. Lunch is no better. I go out with the girls from work and waste money on half eaten slices of salad pizza, half eaten six inch sandwiches from Subway that have my favorite sweet onion dressing in them, and half eaten spicy tuna rolls whose wasabi never gets to spice up my mouth completely and whose wooden chopsticks never get fully stained with soy sauce at the tips. This week I have had dinner plans each night – unable to finish sweet potato fries, Armenian manti, and small mounds of guacamole on my plate with chunky bits of luscious avocado. The only food I am managing to eat in entirety is anything consisting of chocolate, but its more like I finish two thirds rather than just a half.

It is eleven years to the semester that I sat freshman year in a Chaucer class, which was a class at ten o’clock in the morning I leisurely walked to after a delicious breakfast in the Student Union at Hofstra University. I was the only freshman student in the class, for I had placed out of freshman English and was already taking electives as an English major. To this day, one of my most prized texts is the resource guide to Chaucer, which includes poems and medieval testimonies to the life and times of Chaucer’s period of life. The text would not be valid if it did not include the Art of Courtly Love, for that is what Chaucer referenced often for his stories. There is a litany of facts and rules pertaining to being in love in this particular set of codes, most of which I thoroughly disagree with except for a few. Making the top ten of the medieval manifest that seems to pertain to my problem is is: Eating and sleeping diminish greatly when one is aggravated by love.

Aggravated is certainly the operative word here.

Of course I am not aggravated by the reason I cannot eat lately; that is a reason I am extremely and utterly grateful for. I am just aggravated that my stomach decided to get involved in matters of the heart and create less green matter in my wallet each time I go out to eat or go to the supermarket without enjoying the bounties of my purchases.

Still, manifest or no manifest, I still felt like an utter anomaly at lunch with my friend J-Lo yesterday afternoon. I was pushing pasta primavera around my plate and pouting.

Finally, I asked, “Were you able to eat when you first met J?”

My friend responded with a big laugh, eyed me knowing what was really going on, and said, “Ask J what I ate on our first date when we met at the diner.”

The diner? Burgers, fries, shakes, ice cream. I felt more and more outré.

“You cant do that! You have to tell me now!”

“Half a diet coke. He had a burger and fries, and I had half a diet coke.”

And with those words about a half drunken carbonated beverage, I felt a little more at ease and was able to finish my pasta.

Being able to sleep last night, on the other hand, is another tale...