They’re toxic now, those French fries. The ones you ordered me from Burger Club that you’ll later say cost six dollars when I know they cost five. You’ll tell me this after you call me “a monster,” but not as a joke this time. Not like the time, at the Mets game, when you called me a French fry monster after you swore that putting your hand over the paper cup containing your fries was only subconsciously to protect them from my fingers.

You often say that you’re not good with your hands, and what you mean is that you’re not good with your fingers. That’s why, you say, you gave up learning a musical instrument, but I don’t accept this as a reason, because I think if you really wanted to make it work, you wouldn’t have given up on yourself. You are a man of rationale and reason, but I can tell you, without either, that your hands are meant to play an instrument.

And French fries are meant for fingers, but I have never felt seedier, greedier, or creepy-crawlier than when you seized the two open takeout containers from me, closed their lids, and shuffled them, hand to hand, between your hands. You did this with the intention you must not have had when you were trying to learn how to play a musical instrument, and you did it because you caught me choosing the container with the most French fries.

But I didn’t want the one with the most, I wanted the ones that were softer.

I didn’t want the ones that had been cut too thin to tolerate the boiled grease they drowned in (because they were too small and too weak to cling to the grate that saved the others), and so, re-emerged dark, shriveled, brittle; dead and death causing.

Carcinogens.

Could there, perhaps, be a Latin-rooted connection between carcinogen and reincarnation, so that if I were a burnt French fry, I could crumble myself to dust and come back as a version of myself that is different than the self you have come to know?

The self that you often tell me to “check” and that I am always “checking” for anywhere from two to twenty-four hours after we argue, until I have deemed every molecule of myself as terrible, feeble, unlovable, and there is no more “checking” to be done.

Your self necessitates less checking because you meditate daily, listen to dharma talks, and accept things such as the impermanence of everything and the potential nonexistence of things like God, afterlife, and the human soul. You do not consult your ego as often as I consult mine and, therefore, it’s not your ego that is tried for patience when I defend myself with a series of remarks that escalate to my spoken-before-thought conclusion that you no longer love me.

It’s my ego and my desire and ability to manipulate you into feeling guilty that cause me to reject the fries against my desire to devour them. But it is not your ego that causes you to want to strike me, but instead (because you would never), strike the closest thing to me—that stupid, flimsy, chair from Ikea. By closest I mean nearest, but if I were to strike the closest thing to you, it would have been the wall, which, of course, would not have fallen like the chair did.

Those moments when you punched pillows or kicked chairs were once hushed victories for me. I flapped the unflappable and, for one breath, became the grounded one of the two of us, while you took on the role of the monster.

But it’s role reversal, and we both know it. So you take your spot on the futon and cue up the movie we planned to watch together, while I sit across the room from you at the Ikea chair’s accompanying table, using my headphones as earplugs as I distract my fingers from French fries by letting them scream at you through my computer keys into a Facebook message to my friend that says that I’m done accepting the role of monster when we’re both human, to which she responds, “You go girl.”

Freud, horror films, and Eminem all say that monsters are within us and to suppress or deny a monster is to make it more monstrous. I can will myself not to eat the French fries until my will plummets into some void that denying myself of them creates. In attempt to rescue it, I dive into the void too, and as thoughts of fries threaten to derail my fall, I label them toxic because, as they cooled, they must have absorbed residual grease and residual noxious energy from our argument.

As you know, I am capable of making myself believe things are science that not even Web MD (a neurotic’s primary resource) can make one believe. It stands to reason that as French fries cool, they absorb whatever grease would have remained in the empty carton if they had been eaten while they were hot, and the proof is in the fact that one can use a paper towel to dab grease off of the top of a slice of pizza when it’s hot, but the same trick, applied to cold pizza, is done in vain.

But I can only fall so far into the void before I recognize it for what it is—hunger.

I’m hungry for the French fries, and I’m hungry for you, but I think that I’ve checked myself enough to recognize that I don’t deserve either.

So I’ll accept the cooled-off, grease-soaked, carcinogenic French fries as my punishment, and I’ll let you go in hopes that once you’re free of me you will commit to learning the musical instrument that I know you’re meant to learn to play.

(After all, you are musical. You have an affinity for lyrics and rhythm, and you will likely laugh at my attempt here at either.)