Cheese-Caked

It’s amazing how the world melts away with the first bite of a deep fried Mexican eggroll; how idealistic morals, like avoiding mega-corporation restaurants that slap ethnic labels on Americanized food with reckless abandon, fall away with the same listless drop of that crunchy morsel’s broken strings of cheddar jack cheese.

There’s beauty in that moment, when all is still.

And then the fusion of warm avocado and chipotle mayo hit the bottom of your gut with such a resounding “thud” that your body takes the noise as preparation for battle. Suddenly you find yourself ravenous, wide eyed and voracious, in search of another sensation like the one you just experienced. You reach for the rolls — those delicious rolls so hot they burn the roof of your mouth before you’ve shoved a full one in, butter doing swan-dives down your throat like shots of whiskey, and despite the knowledge that bread expands in your stomach it seems to be doing so for the sole purpose of room-making, not taking. These rolls are vast and endless.

Salad is less than an afterthought. It’s merely a means to satiate the wild animal you’ve now become from tearing through the booth and into your neighbor’s triple stack burger with giant slabs of fried egg on top, and so you eat the salad, unsatisfied, tempered only by its dressing that’s equal parts mayonnaise and sugar.

When your meal arrives you take zero precautions to avoid biting off chunks of the waitress’s hand that delivered you this long-awaited sustenance, and you’re not even sure if what you’re swallowing by the greedy handful is pasta, or heaven, or crack. All of the above. When you finish your pupils dart left and right to survey the table of unfinished plates, but those surrounding you are barricading their carcass scraps because you’re all hyenas now. You’re all insane.

Yes you’ll have dessert. Yes you’ll have ice cream with that. Yes you’ll take the whipped cream and yes you’ll scream if the shaking, shivering mouse asks you any more questions rather than just depositing the sweetened dairy products directly into your veins, and when the check comes you sign it without looking because when you walk into The Cheesecake Factory you hand over your wallet along with your soul.

Your human form only begins to take shape again as you enter into the night and the cold air gives you a bit of a slap. You’re sleepy with eyes heavy from gluttony, finding your way to the car like a tranquilized elephant.

The key somehow puts itself in the ignition and cranks to the right, the lights come on with the radio you never shut off, and while too stuffed to buckle your seatbelt you begin twisting right to see out of the car’s back window, then realize in violent instant that you can’t.

You are so full that you cannot reverse your car. And that, my friends, means you are Cheese-Caked.

Original image via W Magazine, collage by Krista Anna Lewis