I’ve had some really strange and bad dreams over the past few nights. The strangest dream happened the night before the fast. I’m going to try to recount it, but it’s really weird.

I’m eating wonton soup, except that when I eat wonton soup I have a ritual where I pick out the pork in the middle of each wonton. This part is all true…Because while I really like the taste of wonton soup, as a vegetarian, I don’t want to eat the pork that festers in the belly of each individual dumpling. Now this is the where things get strange. So, I’m picking out the pork and I come across one particular wonton in my soup, and this bowl must have grown in size now, because this wonton is enormous, only it’s not in the shape of a wonton. It’s as if the pasta shell has straightened itself out, and it looks like one big long sheet of wonton noodle. I see two bones sticking out of this noodle, the way you’d expect a wishbone to look, in that ‘V’ sort of formation.

I’m immediately disgusted by the site of these two rather large bones protruding from in between the two sheets of noodles. I ask a friend to look in between the wontons and tell me what they see. When we remove the top layer of noodle we find half a human body. The two bones belong to the decomposing corspe of some girl. She’s still intact from head to belly, but her skin is gone below that. In fact after the belly all we see are these two large bones in the shape of a V, as if she’s died spread eagle. I scream, but then notice that she’s wearing these really shiny earrings, and they look really pretty on her ears. I debate if the earrings are worth anything and if I should take them off of her ears before we call the police, but upon closer inspection, I realize that the earrings are of the crappy, junky $2.00 plastic variety so I leave them be.

Superficial, yes, although I still don’t really understand my fascination with her earrings as I’m not one to wear much jewelry, let alone buy it for myself. Regardless, I decide not to take the earrings off of her dead body. Instead I get nauseous that I’ve got this dead body in my soup, and I don’t want to eat anymore. I’m still not sure how I carried my soup from the take out place to my home when there’s the now obvious dead body in the bowl, and I’m not sure how it even got in a bowl, or why I had a bowl big enough to house a dead body.

We call the cops and wonder who she might have been and how she wound up in the soup, and why anyone would have killed her. And then I wake up.

I’ve had some other bad dreams this week having to do with particular people and getting into fights. Things like walking off trains because my lover goes to talk to another woman, and then I try to get back on but the doors have shut. In my angry haste, I’ve left my jacket and cell phone on the train, so I can’t call him up or talk to anyone. I have no contact with the my familiar world, and I’ve deposited myself at a train stop in the middle of nowhere. Or the dream from last night, the one where I was at a fraternity party (?!) and I get in a fight with a boy over a girl. It becomes ugly, I start begging him for forgiveness, he won’t talk to me. I don’t know why I’m at this party anyway, I haven’t been to a frat party since I dated a frat boy in college. Should I be admitting this anyway?

I’m physically starved and emotionally drained. I had another not so good night, complete with pounding headache and stomach cramps.

My tongue is still a little white, which means I should continue my fast, but I think I’m going off it as of dinner tonight. Although dinner tonight will consist of vegetable broth and nothing else, I’m still excited about getting back to the act of eating.

I’ve survived my fast. I stuck it out. I’m still sticking it out. I just might stay away from wonton soup for a while.