It’s funny how life turns out sometimes.

Once upon a time, I had a dream. No, it wasn’t to be a writer, or a producer, or a director—having done all to varying degrees of success—it was to open a little bakery.

Nothing grand. Something manageable. Fun. With booze.

It was something I had kept in the back of my mind for Some Day. You know, in case the other thing, the Artist thing; the real thing I was doing with my life didn’t pan out.

And then it didn’t.

When failure came knocking at my door, it knocked hard. Failure banged with a sledgehammer. Failure went fucking Medieval on my ass with its Battering Ram of Suck.

This week, I find myself cooking out of habit, then eating nothing or just picking around the perimeter of each nicely plated meal before packing the remains in plastic tubs. I have no appetite but am fixing delicious things, increasingly complex productions that fill my dollhouse-size apartment with perfect smells. In an effort to rationalize this situation, I shift from stewing over heartbreak to focus on science. While earning a nutrition degree, I learned we crave fatty things for their esters – compounds that carry smell and impart taste. From smell and taste, we derive pleasure and comfort, and from fats we derive fuel. The stuff that keeps our mechanical bodies going also plumps our hearts like pillows, in the figurative as well as literal sense. Fats are comforting and clogging. I also learned we crave sugar when there is a lack of sweetness in daily life. All I can stomach right now are Pink Lady apples and endless cups of honeyed hot milk. This indulgence and dependence is risky – artificial sweetness is inevitably succeeded by a bigger crash