Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread

by Chuck Palahniuk

I mean, back before I was married I had this one girlfriend who was fat. We were, both of us, fat together so we got along. That girlfriend, she was always testing us on new diets to lose weight, like eating nothing except pineapple and vinegar, or nothing but green algae from an envelope, and she was suggesting we take long walks together until she started to shed the pounds, her hips just melted away, and you never saw anybody so happy. Even then I knew something would wreck it. You know the feeling: When you love somebody, you’re happy to see her happy, but I knew my girlfriend was going to dump me because now guys with careers and health insurance were getting her on their radar. I remember she was pretty and funny before, but now that she was getting so skinny it was obvious she possessed vast untapped reserves of self-control and self-discipline way out of my league, and my friends weren’t any help because they were all circling, waiting for us to call it quits so they could date her, and then it turned out it wasn’t the pineapple or the self-discipline because she found out she really had cancer, but she slimmed down to wearing a bitch’n-hot Size Two before she died. That’s how I know happiness is like a ticking bomb.