Quietly counting out enough money to decently tip the delivery guy, you grumble quietly in response to his thanks and take the paper bag from his arms. It’s warm and it smells familiar, but the weightlessness of it in comparison to other nights of impulsive take out reflects your appetite – or lack there of. Unloading the few cartons of only semi-authentic Chinese food, you toss the paper bag into the corner of the kitchen and pull the wooden chopsticks from their red encasing. The ends snap easily and you wince because the wood is frayed and splintered and it’s all too reminiscent of parking lot confessions and the way things that once appear to be held together so convincingly can fray and crack with the slightest bit of pressure.

The noodles are warm and the familiarity of the smell usually swirls around you with comfort. But tonight it’s different, and suddenly familiarity is the last thing you want. So you end up just pushing the noodles around with your chopsticks and thinking about her. You realize it was naive of you to even consider the possibility of tucking the past events away in the starch white confines of a fast food carton equipped with a silver handle to aid in your new task of carrying the weight of the world around with you. It was dumb to think there would be anything you could possibly do that wouldn’t make you think of her; that you wouldn’t look at your late night meal and see the noodles as the tangled mess your life had suddenly become, unable to determine where one thing stopped and another started. And you find that the more you tamper with it, the more you fiddle with those stupid wooden sticks, the more everything intertwines and twists and locks around everything else in even more confusion. And you wish you’d known this earlier.

But you didn’t know. And even if you had, that wouldn’t have made your decision any easier, any less pressing. You had to say it, and if you end up taking anything away from this it will be that regrets hang heavy around your neck like paperclip necklaces and the strings from sombreros. Confessions don’t take them away, but the weight is somehow more bearable and you can finally stand up straight again on a podium where the world makes sense and she smiles back because she knows but she doesn’t care.

So you do stand. Shoving the non-eaten carton of Chinese food to the middle of the table, you push back your chair and rub your face with your hands, attempting to loosen the skin that had once been pulled taut from liquid pain rolling hopelessly down one side of your face before you had the chance to will it away. But your skin loosens up and your tears have dried and, eventually, when your appetite comes back, you will be able to work through a tangled pile that, logically, just has to have a beginning and an end.