Zero

Today I am thinking that to be fat is to retain a vexing relationship with the number zero. This thought arrives with an egg in my hand. I am preparing an omelette and contemplating the mathematical representation of nothing, which at certain angles resembles the contour of the egg I am about to crack. There isn’t much a fat guy can do to flatter his figure. It’s more a case of damage control the GQ article I read in high school advised. The lifeless yellow yolk plops into the ceramic whipping bowl. Syrupy albumen chases it down as if to ask permission. Once, when I was trying on a suit for my grandfather’s funeral, a tailor informed me that strapping a belt around a very wide waist is like tying a string around the bottom of an egg. When I heard this, I imagined a crimson thread pulled taut over an egg’s equator. Did you know that the widest part of an eggshell is called the equator? It is something I almost want to announce on the street—that this little zero I once cradled in my palm had a geography, was itself a sort of world. The reason I was […]