Today you are thinking that to be fat is to feel an inscrutable connection to the color yellow. It was there, on the side. In a little white ceramic dish, next to the girlish pink and boyish blue packets. The yellow squares of Splenda sandwiched in between (which gender is yellow?) were measured out for easy use. You reached for yellow, the color your father always picked. You gutted it. The pale powder rained into your iced tea where it did not dissolve but clumped, embarrassed, at the bottom. It was a trick Dad once had to learn: how to color himself smaller. Saccharine and aspartame will kill you, he reminded you, summoning Sweet-N-Low and Equal by their legal names.

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In his essay on the color yellow, Alexander Theroux identifies the hue as that of adipose tissue, and sickness, and honey, and Easter, and sponges, and blondes, and piss, and Judas’s robes. 

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Each afternoon after kindergarten let out, Dad drove you to McDonald’s where you both ordered chicken nuggets and fries. Together, you grew. Together, you sat swallowing beneath the glow of yellow arches, and you grew convinced this was what the gates of heaven looked like: golden light over a sticky jungle gym and a father and son, their mouths so stuffed with yellow there was no room for speech. 

*

In six years’ time, your father would be skinny and his skin baked golden by ultraviolet tubes. You would be bigger, despite his interventions. For example: oatmeal. You always spooned the tasteless mush into the kitchen garbage can at six-thirty a.m., just before Dad was to drive you to school. You had tried sweetening it with honey, spoonfuls of Splenda from a yellow box—inedible still, despite your interventions. Last resort: rebellion, in that American way of waste, jettisoning calories into some dark maw. It was like an oil painting—the shock on your father’s face mirroring your own, the drops of oats suspended between bowl and bin, all inflected by the sallow light of the buzzing kitchen fan. Have you ever discarded food prepared by your father? Ever said, this grain you gave me, labored for me to eat, is no good? It was then that you knew your body was a failure. 

*

Seven years later, you would find a garment: a plaid button-up shirt patterned with green, orange, pink, and blue, though its dominant color was yellow. It would be called garish and fruity—and it was, and so were you, hello. Clothing had always been drapery, something to hide your too-yellow insides threatening to spill out. But this yellow shirt, it fit you. It fit you, or enough of you for you to dream of comfort in your saturated life. 

*

In college, you would be riding in the car back to campus munching on a bag of tortilla chips when Dad would say to you I just don’t get it. I don’t get how a boy with a mom and a dad who love each other could end up liking boys. You were old enough by then to know your relationship with words like “boy” and “man” was complicated; you felt too big for them, or they too small for you. But how to explain that to the man whose food you refused? How to speak when flayed, your adipose cells exposed to the thick car air like a wound? You had only grown bigger since—another long, smoldering betrayal. 

*

Judas is the bad guy, of course. The snitch, the rat. But was it not the Lord who fed Judas soaked bread? He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it. And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, son of Simon. And after the sop, Satan entered him. Causation being murky, you can only conclude that the story required it. Yellow is a necessary wrong.