Day 1: No Mac and Cheese

This is how it starts: with an ordinary Tuesday and an unassuming box of macaroni and cheese perched on the supermarket shelf. It’s the color that hooks me first—the kind of orange you only see in sunsets and synthetic food. The box, as always, radiates its siren call of nostalgia. Not even nostalgia, really—something closer to addiction cloaked in the guise of comfort. My feet slow down as I pass it, and then I hear it: a soft murmur of promises. I’m warm. I’m easy. I’ll make you feel whole.

But I can’t. I’ve decided. Today is Day 1. No Mac and Cheese.

It isn’t just about health. It’s about the gravitational pull of the stuff—the way I’ve oriented my life around its molten, silky reliability. The cravings, sure, but also the rituals: boiling the pasta, whisking the packet of powdered neon into milk, the faint chemical tang of cheese-like substances mingling with the steam. All of it, like a quiet religion, one that demands worship through repetition. And now I’m renouncing it. I feel like I’ve excommunicated myself.

By midday, the withdrawal symptoms hit. They’re not physical, not yet—there’s no sweating or shaking—but it’s in my brain, a foggy sort of unrest. My stomach whines in protest, but I ignore it. Feed me, it growls. Feed me the orange stuff. I distract myself by walking through the city.

And there it is again. Everywhere. The deli by the corner brags about their artisanal mac and cheese with smoked gouda and pancetta. The food truck offers a “Build-Your-Own Mac & Cheese Bowl” special, the menu oozing words like truffle oil and crispy breadcrumbs. Even the pizza shop has it stuffed into a calzone. The world is conspiring against me.

I keep walking, trying to think about literally anything else. But the memory hits me like a freight train.

I’m ten years old in my grandmother’s kitchen, sitting cross-legged on the linoleum floor. She’s stirring a pot on the stove, the wooden spoon clanging against the sides, and she doesn’t look at me when she speaks. The trick is the butter, she says, more to the pot than to me. You have to melt it just enough before you add the milk. Too soon, and it doesn’t blend right.

When she hands me the bowl, it’s perfection incarnate. The pasta is tender but not mushy, the cheese clinging to every curve and crevice. I eat it in silence, reverent, and she watches me, smiling faintly, her hands resting on her apron like she’s just cast a spell.

I shake the memory off. I have to. Nostalgia is the enemy today.

By evening, the cravings are visceral. I can almost feel the texture of it in my mouth—the pliant give of the noodles, the way the sauce coats my tongue. I swear I can smell it too, faint but insistent, like someone three blocks away has just torn open a Kraft box and set the water to boil.

I force myself to cook something else—brown rice, roasted vegetables, some kind of grilled protein that I can’t even taste because I’m too busy mourning what’s missing. The plate is nutritionally balanced, sure, but emotionally barren.

That night, I dream of mac and cheese. It’s ridiculous, I know, but in the dream, it’s alive—writhing in the pot, tendrils of steam curling into words: Come back. You need me. It smells like my grandmother’s kitchen. It smells like safety. I wake up sweating, my stomach churning with hunger and longing.

By the end of Day 1, I’m hollowed out, raw. It’s not just the lack of food, not really. It’s the lack of the ritual, the loss of the tiny, perfect moment when the cheese sauce meets the pasta, and the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. It’s the absence of comfort in its purest, most unexamined form.

And yet, here I am. Still standing. Still mac-and-cheeseless. Tomorrow will be Day 2.

I think.