(Read this with an Edgar Allen Poe voice in your head.)

‘Tis two hours left of this dark day, one hundred twenty minutes in a bleak countdown to end the week. Seven days with claws digging into your flesh, seven days of a spirit-sucking demon whispering over your ear, driving you to end this, end this, even as you sit in helpless misery and the damp secretions of your desperation hang off your brow and eyes like so many ignored and inconsequential desires. This week is a dream killer. Worse than that, it brings to mind fantasms of possibility which tease you to reach a weak hand to it, only to have these hopes instantly dispel as strange voices and things unnamed laugh and mock. The drain on your mind and soul after mere days bleed into a growing emptiness inside, and suddenly you are nothing. Nothing but what you never could be and will never touch again. Seven days draw to an end, but the closer this end comes the farther it pulls away, reminiscent of the near stopping of time when one is on the Stairmaster.

Midnight, almost midnight. The symbolic 00:00 o’clock, signaling the demise of this last day when the shackles disengage and life begins anew. Is it cheating, then, is it a soul-sacrificing sin to, in two hours, touch that elusive haunting giant chocolate chip birthday cookie, or will I be trading in forevermore the fantasy of physical thinness that compelled me to chain these shackles upon my then-innocent being seven long days prior? Have I been transformed, or have I learned nothing…?