I remember the singular, frightening concentration of a three day juice fast. Food. Food. Foodfoodfoodfood. Juice ceases to be food. Juice ceases to be satisfying or nutritional, it ceases even to seem to have mass, except of course when it forces me to run to the bathroom to pee thirty times a day. It has mass on its way out. But inside, it's nothing. Less than nothing. I take a deep breath the second morning and my stomach stays the same. There is nothing to pooch it out. The air is tiny enough by itself, without any food, that it makes no difference in what it looks like. This makes me feel as though I am suffocating.

It is just like me, I think, to be so dramatic about three days of juice when this is in no way life threatening and millions of people are suffering much worse as I write. It is just like me, but it does make sense, when you think about it, because one's own suffocating is immediate and the rest of the world's suffering, even if it were every single other human being on the planet, is not. To consider it makes me feel redundant and selfish. Anyone else would feel this way, or they should, but it's impossible to change.

Last time I did this I was still in school. I took my container of grape juice up to the anthropology lounge, along with Nick, his container of grape juice, and things to play hangman with. In the kitchen, someone was microwaving some kind of frozen Italian dinner. I say this now, 'some kind', but back then, I knew all its ingredients from the instant I stepped into the stairwell. Butter, parmesan, tomatoes, basil, pepper, all thick as mustard gas in the stairwell. It almost laid me out along the banister. I would have punched the woman in in the kitchen in the face for her lunch. One bite of her lunch, even. Her permission to sit in the hallway and smell it as she microwaved it until it sizzled and burned.

Normally, I hate frozen dinners. I spent my last two years of high school eating potato chips, grapes, and frozen dinnners, and the smell of a Lean Cuisine still takes away my appetite instantly. I never thought I'd find an exception, but apparently all it takes is about 40 hours of grape juice and lemonade. How long would it take for me to find celery, my taste nemesis, mouthwatering? 1 day of nothing? Less?

Probably less before I became so singularly minded that I couldn't concentrate on anything else. It's been about 12 hours now and this entry speaks for itself.