While I feel terrible about what I am going to do….. I also don’t feel bad enough to stop.  I’m mostly writing this to make sure that I am ready to take the next step.  I can’t stop thinking about it.  And I am so excited.  He’ll be home any minute now.

​

It all started a little over a year ago as we were pulling out of a fast food drive thru.  My boyfriend was driving and we were both starving.  And neither of us could wait much longer.  So, I started grabbing food from the bag and shoved some into his face, trying to be fun and flirty, just sort of teasing his hungry ass.

​

“Shelby, you know I don’t like to eat and drive.  It’s dangerous.”

​

I was holding the fries right below his nose which meant he was getting the full brunt of it.  And from the other seat that wonderful smell of salted and fried potatoes was making my stomach growl so I could only imagine what it was doing to him.  I knew he was starving and I knew that it would be too much for him eventually and that he would break any minute and that I would win.

​

“Well…. Then maybe….. I’ll just eat em.  They are my fries after all.”

​

I said this playfully, trying to tempt him into changing his mind, giving him a sidelong look that was almost flirtatious as I withdrew the offering.

​

And my little ploy was starting to work.  He stopped focusing on the passing traffic and turned his attention my way as I slowly opened my mouth and began to bring the fries into it making everything as dramatic and time consuming as possible.

​

Now he was just staring straight at me, a droplet of sweat slowly making its way down his furrowed brow as the morsels moved closer and closer to my open mouth.  Centimeter after amusing centimeter.  And as the fries moved into position, I began to ever. so. Slowly.  Close my teeth around them.

​

“STOP!” he shouted.

​

My boyfriend jumped forwards a little as my teeth finally touched the soft skin of the potatoes I had been using for this little gag of mine, throwing up both of his hands in a placatory motion as he shouted.

​

“Please.  I was wrong.  Can I please have some of your fries?”

​

He was always really cute when he begged.  So, satisfied that I had won this playful little exchange I smiled and said “Of course darling.”  And I moved the fries in his direction.

​

The car behind us honked, annoyed at us blocking the way, startling both of us.  We both stared at each other for a second and then burst into laughter and after we regained our composure, my wonderful boyfriend pulled out onto the road.

​

Things continued normally for a little while as I fed him fries and he drove taking a few for myself each time, the old one for you one for me thing.  He asked me when my tests started and I reminded him that nursing finals started next week, so I had the whole weekend to study and he had the whole weekend to mess around.

 

He was in the middle of a counterpoint, telling me how, no, actually, I was the one who was getting to mess around all weekend; I would get to take my time studying, learning, getting smarter, which, according to him, was my favorite thing to do, while he, my incredibly beleaguered man would be out there, working, breaking his back delivering scaldingly hot pizzas, just so that I could sit in my ivory tower practicing my favorite hobby.

​

I punched him gently in his shoulder and was thinking about what equally silly thing to say back when I realized there was something off about the fry I had just chomped on.  It wasn’t normal.  It was thick.  And tough.  Nothing like a potato at all. 

 

It was meat. 

​

I was excited for a second; oooh, cool, I got a free nugget with my fries!  That was always a nice little treat. ….. but no.  That wasn’t right either.  The texture was all wrong.  It was like I was chewing on extremely tough jerky that had just been in the fryer for a second, like this was all bones and ligaments with little meat at all.  And the shape of the thing was wrong too.

​

Rather than being circular or oblong like a nugget it was long like a fry but much more bulky.  And as my teeth came to a halt and I bit all the way through the thing I had the horrible realization that the reason it felt uncooked is because it was.  The mystery meat was almost completely raw and as I finally severed the piece I had first clamped down on I could tell this because of the blood. 

​

It came out of the meat like it would from any other except this wasn’t fresh.  There were small clumps throughout the gush of stale blood and it filled my mouth with the taste of curdled plasma and rotting iron.

​

My body realized what was happening long before I did and it engaged my vomit reflex and a short but vicious struggle ensued.  I have no idea why I thought it would be a good idea to keep that wretched bite down. 

​

Maybe it was just that I was used to trying not to vomit much more than I was just letting it happen so, despite the disgust and the dawning realization of what was happening it became a battle of one reflex against another.

​

My boyfriend noticed what was going on only as I dropped the horrifying morsel to the floor and clamped my hands to my mouth to try to hold everything in.

​

“Honey?  Are you all right?”

​

I gargled soda and spit repeatedly into a napkin trying, in vain, to get that rancid and overpowering flavor out of my mouth and off of my tongue.

​

A little shakily, I responded.

​

“Yeah.  I think I’m ok.  I just…….. I got a raw nugget.”

​

I don’t know if I really believed what I said but it was certainly what I wanted to believe.  That I had just bitten into something undercooked and a little past it’s sell by date.  But I think I already knew.

​

“Oh.  Gross, chuck it out the window!”

​

He rolled my window down for me, trying to make me feel better.  But it all came crashing together when I reached down to grab the thing, my mind finally realizing what my body had known instinctively and my first reflex reasserted itself over the second.

​

I tried to scream but as soon as I opened my mouth my stomach evacuated itself with as much force as my body could muster.  My boyfriend, shocked and scared, and very very worried forced his way into the turn lane without looking, clipping another car as he did so.

​

It was a good thing that he had rolled down the window, because judging by the amount of vomit streaming down the side of his car we both would have been plastered with it if he hadn’t.

​

This was small comfort to me.  I couldn’t stop shaking and trying to get the filth out of me, I was half out the window, gripping it like my life depended on it and dry heaving, using every ounce of will I had to try and force anything left in me, out.

​

“O my god, honey, are you okay?” was all he could think to say.

​

And all I could do in response was point down, into the seat well at the disgusting piece of misfortune that had somehow forced its way into our lives and inside of me.

​

He bent over to pick it up and, after staring at it for a moment, he dropped it as though he had been burned by it.  And we both had been I suppose, by the realization of the familiar form that I had accidentally ingested.

Just barely sticking out of the end of the deep fried rot was a bone.  The tip of a human finger bone.

​

Our lives became a whirlwind after that.  My boyfriend immediately called for an ambulance and several police came with it. 

​

At first they were more concerned with the damage between both cars but when my boyfriend loudly protested and waved the rotten finger at them, both the attitude of the police and the other driver shifted. 

 

The man who hit us did a little throwing up of his own and the officers, some of whom seemed to lose all concept of what they were supposed to do once the term “accidental cannibalism” had come up, well, most of them just booked it to the restaurant to demand that they close down IMMEDIATELY.

​

My boyfriend helped load me into the ambulance and assured me that he would be right behind me, as soon as the police would allow it.

​

From there things became very litigious. 

​

I was physically fine.  I had puked up most of the single bite I had taken.  And the doctors assured me that even if I had eaten the whole thing I probably would have been ok.  There were many people who had to do such things to survive and were little worse for wear.  Honestly, it was it being a rotten finger that could have actually caused an issue. 

​

That, and the mental scarring, of course.

​

I couldn’t eat for weeks.  I had to leave school.  I still have trouble trusting food prepared for me by other people. 

​

Even if it had just been a lizard that made its way into the deep fryer somehow we still would have sued out of disgust but this?  It was unlike anything I had ever heard of.  And I just…. I couldn’t ever quite seem to get the taste out of my mouth.  It stopped being there at some point.  But I couldn’t tell you when.  All I could do every time I tried to calm myself was feel around, inside my mouth, with my tongue and each time I was almost certain I could still feel a thin layer of rot and grime, a thin film of filth coating the inside of my palate, an eternal reminder of what I had done.  It was just a part of me now.  Cannibal.

​

So, as I shuffled between home and therapists, trying my best to curb the development of a potentially life threatening eating disorder, my wonderful, wonderful love took things to the courthouse on my behalf.

Of course, I still had to show up, half dead in a suit meant to hide my withering frame, looking like I had just been given the beating of a life time from all the crying, and puking, and malnourished eye rubbing, but, eventually, thankfully, we won.

​

And at some point during that awful, terrible year, the abominable taste left me.  And slowly, ever so slowly, our lives got in order, not quite back together but we managed to make things start to feel halfway decent again.

​

While it didn’t erase anything that had happened, the money did help.  A little.

​

Because we had it my boyfriend was able to stay with me, whenever I needed him to and when I was well enough we took a little break from everything.  We drove away and into the mountains for a while and when we finally got back things had started to seem like there was the potential for normality.

​

A little while after that I took a small chunk of the money and got back into med school.  It was weird having to retake some classes while everyone I knew had moved on but school was school.  It was something I had been doing for a long time and after I got back into it that familiarity really made things start to feel like nothing much had changed.  Like that whole awful year had just been a terrible and surreal detour.  Almost.

​

Because if things had gotten back to normal, I wouldn’t be here, posting this, now would I?  My story really started to take its turn a few weeks later.

​

Nose deep in one of my newly purchased remixes of the same medical tome I had gotten for this exact same class before all the misery, I was so focused on copying terms to flash cards that I hadn’t heard my boyfriend arrive and he decided to take this rare opportunity for a surprise attack.

​

With the radio playing the classical station softly in the background he closed the front door as quietly as he could and removed any jingling things he happened to have on him.  He put his keys and his backpack down gently and slipped his shoes off to boot.  Shocked that I had not seen him out of my peripheral vision at once, he must have felt quite assured that this was his one and only chance to really get me good.

​

He creeped up behind me, still unnoticed and moved as slowly as he could manage until he was in the perfect striking position.  And then he got me.

​

That lovable bastard grabbed me around the waist and using an acrobatic agility I did not know he had, he pulled me bodily from my sitting position, managing to move me off of my chair and out from under the table where I had been studying without smashing me into either.

​

“I GOTCHYA!!!” he shouted as he started to swing us both around.

​

I had been completely snapped out of or rather into reality and I had no idea what was happening.  Normally, like most people who had thought they were alone, I am sure I would have screamed.  However, he picked me up so fast and moved from just shouting to swinging us around and tickling me that even if any shriek did try to leave my mouth all I heard by the time it got there was laughter.

​

He swung me around for a few seconds as I giggled and protested and we both nearly crashed into everything in the living room.  Instead, he gently brought us both down in a mostly soft landing on the carpet nearby.

​

Breathless and prostrate, cradling each other and giggling like it was our first night together, we stared at each other for a moment, both of us taking stock of where we had come from and where we had been, we looked at each other with love and appreciation.  It was the first time in a while that any of our coupley inclinations had felt so natural and free, just an unforced moment of appreciation and longing.  We brought our faces towards one another, keeping our eyes locked as long as we could, and we kissed.

​

It felt so wonderful to still be wanted, after everything that had happened to us.  To me.  And as our lips pressed against each other I began to sense the cobwebs burning away from the engine of my passion for this wonderful man as it began to reignite and burn through the rubble of our troubled days which had kept it hidden. 

​

It was a sweet caress, all the better for how long it had taken us to get back to this point, all the more ferocious as my appreciation for his willingness to wait for me to be ok began to show itself in the movement of my lips upon his.  Things were beginning to get hot and heavy.  And then I bit him.

​

I’m still not 100 percent clear on what exactly happened but somehow, during our impassioned foreplay I bit down a little too hard on his lower lip and let my canine linger for just a little too long and then there was blood in our mouths.  His blood.

​

Our reactions were quite different.  His initial reaction was to stop at once.  I don’t know what he thought he was going to do about it.  It’s not like he could put a bandage on his lip and then just keep going but that was his reaction.  He realized he was bleeding and tried to pull away.  But me?  I held on.  I kept him there.  I didn’t want this to stop.  Not after it had taken so long to get back to this point and things were going so well.

​

I wasn’t sure that anything out of the ordinary was going on until I got a taste of his blood.  I just felt him trying to pull away.  But after another moment, when we kept going, I realized that my lips were wet and not just moist but coated, if ever so slightly.  But I didn’t draw back.  I didn’t stop.  No.  This felt almost familiar.  It became clear after a moment that this was my boyfriend’s blood.  The wound stopped bleeding a few moments later and it could have been no big deal.  I thought it was actually kind of hot, not quite kinky, but a definite turn on for sure.  I got a little extra of him than he expected to give away and it added a little interesting flavor to the whole experience.  But this, I believe, is what led to my dreams.

​

Later that night, after the love making and the dinner and the homework all were done and we were both snuggling up against each other in a cozy post loving haze, the two of us just gently drifting off into whatever would accompany us through that night’s rest, I found myself remembering fondly how the day had begun.  With his lips on mine.  A soft red between us.

​

And that was when I had the dream for the first time.

​

The impression it left on me was intense.  But try as I might I couldn’t grasp it, no matter how many times throughout the day a wisp of whatever it had been floated its way through my head and forced me to take a second to pause and try to really remember it.

​

Eventually, though, night came again and I went back to sleep and the vision from the evening before returned to me.  I came to right from it, an hour to early and with my mind racing.  I tried my hardest to reach back through the veil of sleep to grasp at the memory of that dream but to no avail.

​

Things went on and on like this, each night I would awaken from this dream feeling more and more sure that there was something to it, that it was of the utmost importance that I remember what was happening and what I was doing, only to find myself staring at a clock that read earlier and earlier seemingly having traded hours for bits of memory. 

​

I brought a little, tiny piece of it with me each night, the knowledge that there was someone there with me, the idea that we were doing something together or that I had done something to them, each night I learned a little bit more and felt a little worse for it as what sleep I did manage to get seemed to do less and less for me.

This nagging feeling of needing to know began to permeate my days. 

​

I stopped being able to give my classes my full attention because each time there was a lull in the lecture this nagging feeling in the back of my mind would leave me staring aimlessly off into the distance trying to force my brain to give up the secrets of this dream.

​

And this strange personal struggle went on for a several weeks; me getting less rest each night and almost as little in answers until one day I realized that being awake was starting to feel almost as foggy as the dream, at which point the answer just sort of made itself clear to me.

​

I was in the kitchen chopping carrots for a stew.  From the tips of my toes to the point of the knife in my hand, the entire world around me felt fuzzy and slightly out of focus.  It had been like this for days now, the world around me slowly becoming more and more ethereal as I moved closer to zero hours of sleep per night.  And now, while standing in the middle of a brightly lit kitchen in the middle of the damn day I found myself quickly fading out.  Not quite sleep, no, that would have been too helpful, I found myself instead deep in my thoughts, no longer really present in my kitchen but instead fully engaged in trying to understand the specifics of my dream.

​

I could almost see it.  I was nearly there.  The ephemeral image of it was so close at hand now that I could nearly feel the tool I gripped as much as I could the knife with which I was chopping.  They were becoming one and the same.  No.  That wasn’t quite right.  They were one and the same.  The blade in my dream was the knife that I was using in the kitchen and…. There was blood on the blade.

​

“AUWH!”

​

And now there was blood on both of them.  And I knew.  The moment I cut myself it finally, fucking FINALLY, came back to me.  What I was doing.  And who I was doing it to.

​

Shocked from this brutal realization nearly as much as the shallow yet gushing wound I had just inflicted upon myself all I could do was stare.  The blood from the blade looked almost reasonable to me then, a real life remnant of the thing I had been obsessing over, the answer to the question I had been earnestly spending more and more of each day asking. 

​

An inch or so of flesh which I had sliced off the outside of my palm was now sitting on the cutting board next to the blade.  It was here now.  So it was real.  I had wanted this so much and now it was here.  Blood on the blade and flesh on the floor. 

​

But no.  I couldn’t.  I wouldn’t.  I would never. 

​

It did look right though.  Just sitting there.  Right next to the slices of carrots and even more ripe.

“Hey, honey, everything ok in there?” my boyfriend yelled from the other room.

​

And his voice, his lovely, lovely voice, it brought me back to myself and I began to shake, violently.  Instinctually, I backed away from the counter, disgusted and shocked by myself.  What the fuck had I been thinking?

​

Trying to stop, trying to get back to normal I wrapped my arms around me.  But one of them happened to have a rather prominent cut on it and so I found myself immediately wet with my own blood.  I pulled my hand away and gaped at the wound.

​

“Honey, are you all right?  Do you need help?”

​

“…n.  No!  I’m ok.  I just cut myself a little.” I stammered back at him.

​

I started to panic, somehow worried that if he came out here and saw the mess that he would know what was going on, that he would see what had happened and that that would clue him in to what I had been thinking.

“Aw.  Are you sure you’re ok?  Do you need me to get you a bandaid or something?”

​

I started to scramble.  I picked up the piece of skin I had cut from myself fully intending to throw it away but then, I stopped.  I hesitated for a frazzled moment, but only a moment and I wrapped the piece of skin in a paper towel and put it as deep into the freezer as I could manage.

​

“Ah, no.  I’m ok.  I’m just gonna clean everything up out here and then I’ll come bandage it up.”

​

I then did as I had said I would, as fast as I could, now weary and dreary, wrapped in a fuzzy pall of confusion and shame. 

​

My days were paranoid and confused after that.  I called out of all my classes, claiming I was sick to anyone who asked.  And I was, wasn’t I?  My sleep never returned to me.  Most nights I tried my best to avoid it, fearing what awaited me on the other side.  But, on the few occasions when I did slip up and finally gave up my grip on the world I would, of course, be awakened just a few short hours later, now heavy with the full knowledge of who I was dreaming of and what and why.  And I just couldn’t stand it.

​

But my boyfriend, my wonderful, loving boyfriend, straightened everything out for me. 

​

He must have somehow not noticed how out of it I was getting and just assumed that me cooking for him anytime he was hungry was just me being loving rather than an attempt to make sure he never looked in our freezer.  I guess he must have felt really appreciated and decided to try and return the favor in a romantic kind of way.  I can’t be sure.  All I can know is that a few days later upon entering our bedroom he presented me with a pair of shitty sex store handcuffs.

​

“What are those?” I asked, bewildered.

​

He looked away, sheepish for a moment, before explaining.

​

“I know handcuffs in the bedroom was something you were always really curious about.  And you’ve been doing so well lately, and you’ve been going out of your way to be nice to me.  So I figured it was about time I tried to return the favor.”

​

He flashed that sly little smirk of his, both sheepish and self-assured simultaneously, and despite all the overwhelming awfulness in my life, he had me.

​

We started to kiss and moved from the doorway to the bed.  He gently placed the plastic handcuffs into my hands and helped me to thread them through the slats of our headboard.  I tugged on the chain after I closed the cuffs around his wrists, making sure that he was in nice and tight and then I stood up to admire our handiwork.

​

“………wow……”

​

The room almost seemed to exhale with me.  The sound I made was low and meek, not at all an appropriate representation of the powerful feelings that were washing over me.

​

There it was.  There he was.

​

Just like in the dream.  There was only one thing missing now.

​

I turned and ran from the room, nearly tripping and falling as I manically stumbled my way out and into the kitchen.

​

My boyfriend called after me, clearly worried. “Honey!  Are you all right?!”

​

“I’m fine.  I’ll be right back…. i….I just had a great idea!”

​

A great idea which I proceeded to remove from its place with the rest of the cutlery and return to the bedroom with.

​

Knife in hand, I found a feeling of finality and elation pulsing through the cloak of exhaustion which came with me, a nervous kind of electricity which moved me and spread out and into the tired air around me, lapping the walls and every other surface until my delirious state coated the room like a second layer of paint which it was finally appropriate to apply.

​

Knife in hand, I stepped into the room with a strange, crooked smiled inadvertently plastered across my face.  A smile who’s odd look and haphazard application removed, immediately, any joy which my boyfriend had in his own expression. 

​

And then he saw the knife.

 

“Honey!  What the fuck!”
 

I tried my best to quell his fear and bewilderment, to try and somehow sneak him into the same mind space I now occupied.  I looked at the blade almost as he had looked at the handcuffs; sheepishly and with a dash of forced innocence added to the theatrics of my gaze.

​

“This?  You’re not scared by this, are you?”

​

I moved towards the bed as I spoke.  He recoiled unconsciously from my approach, clearly quite nervous as he fought with his plastic constraints, attempting in vain to free himself; however, as I began to touch him, slowly dragging my fingers up his exposed thigh, coming ever closer, he started to relax a little, to try and give himself over to the moment and to me.

​

“I just thought you were going to get something kinky… like duct tape for my mouth or something….. not a giant knife.”

​

“And why would I get tape?” I asked as I moved myself onto the bed and over his body, lowering myself onto him gently, trying to maintain enough composure to make a meaningful point as weeks of sleepless anticipation crashed against my conscious mind.

​

“I love the sounds you make.”

​

My words seemed to be beginning to work on him.  I could feel his rising excitement from behind me as I sat on his stomach, ever so gently rocking and attempting to make an enticing face.

​

“You do, huh?”

​

“Yeah I do.  And this?”

​

I brought up the knife then, letting him see that I still had it.  I could feel his whole body tense up at the reintroduction of the blade.  But I kept going.

​

“This is about power, dear.  It’s about control.  Are you saying you don’t like this?  You don’t like it when I have control over you?”

​

Between my flirtatious words and my subtle movements he was beginning to come around.  He grunted in a pleased sort of way, like he was beginning to very much find the situation to his liking.

​

“And what will you do with all this power, huh?”

​

And with that, I had him. 

​

“Anything I damn well please.” was my response.

​

I now repositioned myself, nuzzling my boyfriend in a more natural and pleasant way.  We were now almost touching, all that separated us was the thin material of our underwear.

​

I continued my gentle rocking, needing him to stay happy and needing him to stay in place. After a few moments of making sure that he was satisfied, I finally brought the only thing that mattered into play.

​

I tried my best to go slow, to not completely lose myself to this flood of feelings from the sleeping world and give myself completely over to the dream.  I didn’t want to hurt my boyfriend.  I loved him.  I just wanted to sleep again, like a normal person.  I just wanted to have a little fun with him.  That was all.

​

But almost immediately, as soon as I began to trace the blade of the kitchen knife across his skin, I could feel myself getting lost in the waves of fuzzy dissociation as the heat of the moment crept its way down my arm and along my hand until nearly all I could feel was the metal of the blade as I moved it along the beautifully rippling patterns the muscles created in my boyfriend’s skin.

​

The dream was just under the surface now and everything, all the nights I had lost, all the reassurance I craved, it was right there beneath my boyfriend’s lovely, lovely skin.  Just waiting for me.  I wonder what it would be like too

​

“Shelby!”

​

He was yelling.

​

I managed to tear myself away from myself then, but just barely.  I think he may have been getting uncomfortable with how much I was using the knife on him.  I hadn’t cut him, not really, I had just been tracing his muscles and ribs with the blade.  However.  When he distracted me and I stopped looking at the knife, maybe thinking to pull the blade away from him I did it too quickly, applied just a little too much pressure and then there was a sizeable gash in his side.

​

“Shelby!  What the fuck!?”

​

He was panicking now, I probably would have been too.  I must have nicked something important because for such a small slash he was bleeding quite a bit.  He was yelling, asking for my help but all I could do was stare.

After a few tries he was able to break the chains of the plastic cuffs.  He got out of the bed grabbing the first piece of cloth he could and applying it to his side.  A few moments later the door slammed.  I think he had still been yelling as he left.  I’m not really sure.  The whole time he was leaving I was still on the bed, enraptured by the small pools left by his spurting blood.  I admired them for a time.  Then I dipped my finger into one, ever so gently, and brought it to my mouth. 

​

I immediately ran to the kitchen and grabbed the first container I could find, ran back to the bedroom and gathered as much of it up as I still could.

​

Such a beautiful, warm, red liquid, it was filled with his wonderful essence, and it tasted just like our kiss.

​

He didn’t come home that night.  I had spent the day just sort of reminiscing, thinking on everything that had happened and waiting for him to come home.   I spent most of my time sitting on the bed replaying everything that had just happened and waiting for my boyfriend to reappear.  At some point during all of that nothing, I drifted off into a nice and peaceable sleep.

​

I awoke from the dream hours later.  It was dark, somewhere in the middle of the night.  And my boyfriend had still not returned.  I lay there in our bed, now cold and alone, trying to will him to return, wishing that he would come back to me. 

​

But then I remembered.  There was a little of him in the fridge, wasn’t there?

​

I sat up, mildly shocked by the idea.  It was a fascinating one.  But I wasn’t sure if it was one I was ready for.  The fridge called to me, beckoning me from the other room.  And as I sat and tried to avoid the inevitable I only made myself colder and more lonely until my feet picked me up and moved me, nearly trance like, into the kitchen.

​

I removed the piece of me from the freezer and the piece of him from the fridge and after a bit of fiddling I managed to cook the one in the other. 

​

One might be tempted to think that the quality of a meal is solely based on its ingredients and the knowledge of the person preparing said ingredients.  I have found, however, that the quality of a meal is nearly as much about set and setting as any other experience and the mood you are in greatly affects the perceived quality  of said meal. 

​

You know when you are extremely upset and nothing tastes substantive and you are completely disinterested in the eating process or when you are extremely hungry and you wolf down whatever is placed in front of you, afterwards saying how that was objectively the best meal that you have ever eaten?  Well, I was missing my man and delusional from weeks lacking sleep and when I smelt the thing I had created from the two of us, despite it being a freezer burned strip of submeat cooked in improperly stored blood, I was sure nothing could be better.

​

The entire time I was chewing on that piece of thin gristle I was happy and content in a way that I find it difficult to describe.  It’s like all the normalcy that had been taken from me, all the happiness and contentment I had been denied by my mind these few weeks came flooding back all at once, like giving in had burst the damn made by my dream.

​

I practically floated my way back to bed and for the rest of the night I stayed there.  I, of course, dreamt the same dream but now it accompanied me as a friend and it stayed with me through those nurturing hours I had been missing so dearly.

​

That night couldn’t possibly undo all the strain and strife I had visited upon myself and yet I woke up refreshed, a new and better woman, clear headed and ready to face the day.

​

Despite this change in attitude and perception my boyfriend still hadn’t returned.  Nor had he seemingly tried to contact me in anyway.  In an attempt to rectify this dark spot in an otherwise pristine day I finally tried to message him.  And when that didn’t work I tried to call him.  Nearly the whole day went by yet he did not return nor did he return my calls.  Nor had he by the next day.

​

I could wait no longer.  I had to know where he had gone.  And for the first time I was struck with the notion that he might not be coming back.

​

No.  I shook my head.  No.  He had stayed with me through so much.  He was just upset.  He was coming back.  He WAS.

​

I had to be sure though.  So, I logged onto his Facebook.

​

I knew he talked to a couple of his friends almost exclusively this way so I thought there was a chance he had been talking to one of them about what had happened.  And I was proven correct.

​

He had been talking to someone earlier that very day.  I scrolled through the conversation with dawning horror.  He had been thinking about leaving.  No.

​

No he couldn’t.  My wonderful, wonderful love.  He would never leave me.  He couldn’t.

​

He had stayed with me through therapy, through turmoil, through lack of nutrition and lack of sleep.  He stayed with me through my cannibalism, something that might have broken a lesser man.  And he had always, that whole time remained my wonderful, loving boyfriend.  The constant and support that let me get through all of that.

​

If I hadn’t been so shocked by disbelief I might have just thrown the computer across the room.

I sulked and I mewled failing in my flailing attempt to reconcile this reality with the one I thought that I knew.  Eventually, I came back to the computer.  And then, when I finally read the last of the conversation, I got it.  I knew what I had to do.   I had my in.

​

Thinking that I was still going to my classes, my boyfriend had said that he was going to drop by the house to pick up a few things, enough stuff to keep him together until he could figure out exactly what he was going to do.

​

But I’m not at school.  And I will be here when he came back.  And then I can actually, finally, make this dream of mine a reality.  I will be there, in the bedroom with him handcuffed to the bed, using the real ones I had bought sometime ago.  I will stand over him with that knife in my hand, just as I have done in my dream, night, after night, after night.  I will stand over my wonderful, amazing, loving boyfriend, and I will take him, all of him, into me.

​

I have to accept it.  This is just who I am now.  A cannibal who needs her love.  And that will no longer be a problem.  My boyfriend will be a part of me now. 

​

Forever.

​

Wish me luck.     ; 3