Before It Becomes the Last
On craving, culture and the power to choose
I started thinking about doughnuts the way thoughts sometimes arrive—uninvited, a little nostalgic, and oddly specific.
It started with Jessie. She’s fundraising for her daughter’s dance—or it’s a grad party, I can’t quite remember as I write this—the point is: doughnuts. Dozens of them. The kind that comes in those flimsy white boxes and somehow disappears faster than you expect. Krispy Kreme.
There’s one on my way to the gym. I pass it most mornings before the world is fully awake, when the streets are still quiet enough to notice things like the red fluorescent sign glowing into the dark—Hot Now. Not subtle, not refined. Just loud and certain. If you’ve ever seen it, you know what it promises—those warm rings of dough drifting along the conveyor like lazy river floats, turning golden, slipping under that soft curtain of glaze. The first batch of the day, still too hot to touch.
And then, out of nowhere—after years of not thinking about doughnuts, not craving them, not even noticing them—I wanted one.
Not a fancy one. Not the kind you’d get somewhere curated and perfect, like Doce Donut. No. I mean a real doughnut. The kind that exists in cartoons and tired jokes about cops. A proper American doughnut. Round. Frosted. Slightly ridiculous.
And I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember the last time I had one.
Was it a maple bar? An old fashioned? A bear claw—does that even count as a doughnut? I genuinely don’t know. My memory just… stopped. Like a page torn out.
And then I remembered something else. A post I’d seen earlier today: everything in life eventually becomes the last.
The last time you see a friend.
The last time you walked through a neighborhood that once felt like yours.
The last time you call, or visit, or stay a little longer.
The last time you eat something as simple, and as unremarkable, as a doughnut.
Not because you decided it would be the last—but because life decided for you.
I don’t even really like doughnuts anymore. Not the way I used to. I get halfway through and I’m done. Me endulcé, as we say in Mexico—I got too sweet. There’s a point where it tips from pleasure into excess, and my body lets me know.
But there’s something about the idea of choosing.
Choosing the last.
Because lately, I’ve been thinking about that in other places too. About how many times we reach out, how long we keep doors open, how often we wait in the quiet space of someone else’s absence hoping it will eventually be filled.
I recently stopped texting a dear friend who hasn’t responded in over two months.
Not in a dramatic way. Not slammed doors or burning bridges. Just… a decision. A soft one, but a clear one. I left the door open. I meant that. But I also decided I would stop being the one to knock.
And there was something sobering in that realization—that the last message I sent might be the last message I ever send them.
Not because I wanted it to be. Not because I declared it so. But because sometimes the last time happens quietly, without ceremony, without agreement.
And still, there was a kind of peace in choosing my side of it.
In deciding where I would stand.
So maybe that’s what this is really about. Not doughnuts, not entirely. But the quiet power of deciding. Of noticing that something might become the last—and instead of drifting into it unconsciously, meeting it there on purpose.
If I’m going to have a last doughnut—whenever that may be—I’d like to know I chose it.
I’d like to remember it.
So tomorrow, when I drive past Krispy Kreme on my way back from the gym, I’ll probably do what I already know I’m going to do. I’ll be pulled, a little dramatically, like a moth to that glowing red light.
Hot Now.
And I’ll pull in, and order one. Maybe old fashioned, for the sake of this whole reflection.
Maybe it will be the last one I ever eat.
Or maybe it won’t.
But at least, this time, it will be mine.
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