My (pop) Secret Shame

I love Christmas popcorn. I wait for it all year. Love, actually, may be a misnomer. Addicted to, obsessed with, once I begin I cannot stop eating it. I refuse to purchase it myself. I eat it at the office or in the homes of others. Once, and I’m not proud of this, I snuck into a friend’s dorm room and ate an entire can. He’d returned with a can after Thanksgiving. I would go into his room ostensibly to smoke cigarettes, but in actuality I was going in there to eat his popcorn. 2, 3, 4 times a day. Unlike me, Andreas was able to munch on the popcorn. A handful every now and again. Imagine his surprise when he opened the tin the Friday after break and found the popcorn gone. As far as he knew the tin had only been opened that Sunday evening. I’d finished the entire container 2 days earlier. I said nothing. Blame fell to the crowd of stoners and smokers who made themselves at home in his room, lounging on his couch and ashing in his empty Snapple bottles. The empty popcorn tin stayed up on his coffee table for the rest of the year. That summer it moved with him to the Cape and even had a place of honor in his off-campus apartment the following year. It became my “tell-tale heart” pop pop pop pop pop pop.