Archive
07/08/08 - (1)
Weight Loss
It took him a little more than a year and a half To accomplish the desired effect: Climbing inside the skin of an invisible man.
Why he set himself such a grotesque goal, Even he, at first, was hard-pressed to explain. All he knew was that he felt compelled to do so,
Almost as though it were a religious rite of passage Or, if not, a matter of psychic urgency — One of those things people do not just for the hell of it.
Whatever evil or guilt was responsible for his resolve, He set about pushing his plate away, at the table, Gradually taking fewer and fewer bites,
Initially seeing meals as rewards he wasn't entitled to, For his having failed at this or that innocuous task, Later, as being tainted with toxic pesticides,
And, in the final stages, as having been laced with Zyklon B, By cooks (he ate all his meals out) Conspiring to do him in (his Jewishness was a dead giveaway).
In due time, his pounds shed him, Shunned him, as if in a collective rebuke, Reduced him, physically, from a robust human being
To a stick figure. From the beginning of his diminution, Through the transitional stages of his dismantlement,
To the denouement of his total transmogrification, A process of jettisoning 140 of his 200 pounds, He became emaciated, razor-thin, skeletal, a wraith.
At a stark sixty pounds, he felt an eerie exhilaration, In returning to that numbing emptiness he'd experienced, That insensate moribundity of the barely living,
Which stalked him, for more than two years, When he was a prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau-Buna, Before being liberated, by the Americans, in 1945...
In returning to those dire privations he'd survived, As if not to do so, once, before he died, Would be to violate a promise he'd made, in the camps,
To never let himself forget, Substitute complacency and excess, for abstinence. At sixty pounds, he could appreciate life, to the fullest.
07/08/08 - (1)
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