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It was like the carnival left town with no time to pack.
He had loved this park when it lived.
The cotton candy stand, the ring toss, the fun house
All looking like he traded memories for nightmares

He's doing that little dance again to empty songs playing from the orchestra pit of his stomach.
His forearms are a minefield of scabs.
Blizzards of skin flaking with each scratch, he's half dust already.
Sitting beneath the decaying iron of his Ferris Wheel
His appetite is rust.
And he is so beautifully thin
He buries the ring here, among the dead.

Rewind
His feet carry him backwards
Folds of clothes billowing behind him as if pulled by some unseen force.
Front door open, he backs into his home and places the ring on the floor, standing back up, he stares at it with ancient ocean sunken eyes.

His ex-wife backs in after him, summons the ring from the floor back to her finger, and they're married again. Her eyes drink tears up her cheeks until her face is empty, and the two scatter around their home, fixing furniture and inhaling hateful words. Puzzle pieces lift off the floor; hovering like glass falcons, they create a vase, leaping to his hand.

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She begs him to get help. Tells him that hiding in a closet doesn't stop people from seeing his skeleton. This is what support looks like.

He laughs scorpion bullets through a dead jester's smile and tells her when he needs to purge, he just thinks about how fat she's gotten.

Rewind
One by one, he welcomes his friends back into his life as they swish their concerns around in their mouths and choke them down. Smiles re-appear on his face and hers and his skin swallows his bones. Two years of lines are erased from their faces.

He sucks half-digested wedding cake up from the reception hall toilet.
They both ask "Do I?" and slip rings from each other's fingers
like an apology. Stress dies down as they abandon wedding plans into dreams, and he drinks his last meal from the bathroom, churning it into food and re-stocking it into the fridge.

Every backwards jog makes the miles on the treadmill readlike a time bomb, his body vaccuums sweat until he achieves his goal weight, and the two of them fit each other perfectly.

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Midnight at the carnival - Fireworks turn the night sky into a neon volcano. He proposes to her at the peak of the ferris wheel. Her shriek is a cannon among cats.

Rewind
Their bodies begin to inflate as they spit health foods into the fridge and return them to the grocery store, replacing them with the junk they find in the trash. His scale begins to read "error" and is refunded.

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The phone says his father's heart has abandoned ship. Not wanting to be a legacy of overstuffed coffins, he declares war on his weight, and she takes up arms alongside him. This is what support looks like.

Rewind
He hangs up the phone as it steals its rings back from the room. The two of them undo each day until they pack their unwritten history up and split their future down the middle, meeting occasionally to vomit coffee into cups and meals onto plates as they forget every detail about each other. They slowly fall out of love, ingesting each final conversation through the phone until the layer of recognition melts from their faces. They part as strangers.

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His appetite is stainless steel, though he just wishes he could stop eating. His friends take him out to the carnival to cheer him up. While there, he sees the most beautiful girl.