When one reaches a certain age, he becomes overly confident of what he requires to survive, not merely physically, but psychologically. I found my requirement a the mere age of ten, upon discovering to my greatest delight how delicious simple routine was: the simple steps of waking, a certain way to eat a certain food, a conviction of daily schedule, and knowing that upon sleeping, one must toss at least once on each side before he may sleep. But there is one routine that I must complete in my adulthood so I may continue with the rest of my year, a phase of the moon almost, so life may continue for not merely myself, but the others who depend upon me in coexistence. The phase of my life takes up the expanse of one day spent in a hospital on the day before Christmas, though it is one of only three days I receive to spend at my leisure for the holidays.

I was in the nauseating throws of the beginning of just another one of those days and it began, as customarily as ever, in a lobby. I loathe the lobby, full of the wretched ill (though even I know they cannot help their rickety wheezes and spontaneous bubbling hiccup fits or despondently rambunctious children who crave returning home to the promise of Christmas Eve tidings). My self-inflicted grief at the noise is only ameliorated by a gilt box large enough to be a pet casket with two pounds worth of chocolates in its belly. Certainly the other parcels at my feet brought me no comfort even glancing at the comfort that rivaled even routine for me: "sorrow eating."

Yes, though one would never behold my chassis and reach this conclusion, I am an undeviating "sorrow eater"; one finds a habit instilled from a rocky childhood is tremendous to break. I remember vividly being two and having my father knock me to one side in passing me in the hall; he had overtly been walking behind my teetering but progressive baby step and must have considered himself to be in an utter rush. Traumatized by the pain in my ear from being cast into the wall, I embarked upon a strident wail when my mother, hastily tottering after my father from the kitchen in hopes to catch him before her fears were realized (her fears that he would storm out and never return), presented me with a batter for a cake she had been baking, a whole bowl, sixteen servings worth of pound cake, muttering in her stringent Polish garble, "Here, now shush." I remember nursing my ear back to health with that batter until my mother returned an hour later pleased, knowing that my father would return. Seeing me licking the bowl clean, she felt it the least of her worries and floated back to the kitchen to start again.

Now, I was doing it again, eating a two-pound box of chocolates I had received as a Christmas present from work, specifying that "Severus and his family" enjoy them. Well, what the hell did they know about me? I was here doing their dirty work and I really was the only one of them with a family, I justified, savoring a hazelnut caramel in white chocolate, though I did not necessarily like white chocolate at all. I began to board the guilt train, prepared to fully hold the faculty responsible for making me want to binge eat for the first time since the year before I was married. But then a few memories came back to me, half-conscious memories of me grading papers with an entire pie at my left wrist, merely because I was bored and wanted to be home for my son's sixteenth birthday and not three thousand miles away deciphering ink stains from the alphabet. Then I remember me doing the same action various amounts of times for various reasons of basically the same caliber.

Drat. So, it was my fault after all. I had begun to do this again. Well, it did not harm me physically, I reasoned internally. I still had a scrawny, skeletal body of a sixteen year-old starving soldier as a forty year-old adult. It was really just an expensive habit, after all, but not truly if you work in a school with a free kitchen. Maybe it would be better if I confronted my problems instead of pushing them aside.

Oh, who have I been listening too? I rolled my eyes at my own indiscretion. I am just fine, thank you very much.

"Severus? He'll see you now," a darkly enthusiastic young woman named Courtney with flaxen fuzz for hair greeted over-exuberantly.

"Thank you," was all I articulated, gathering up a large carpet bag full of parcels at my feet like a half-hearted Father Christmas. Courtney tittered when she saw my feminine mauve carpet bag. "And what are you laughing at my dead mother's bag for?" I demanded irritably.

Courtney caught her breath. "I'm so sorry, I didn't know!"

"She died this time last year," I added bitterly.

"I am so, so, SO sorry," she flushed. "This way, please."

Imbecile, I thought deliciously as I followed her. My mother was, unfortunately, very alive and this was not even her carpet bag. It was mine, and it was mine because it had been cheap and had not fallen apart in ten years.

So began another twelve-hour Odyssey, through which any outsider might know my life in its entirety.