The Meal Swipe

Somewhere on your meal plan there is a soft-serve machine that never runs dry, a cereal bar open past midnight, and a swipe you're allowed to use as many times as your schedule lets you walk through the doors. The Empress doesn't ration her gifts — she sets the table wide and lets you come back for seconds without asking why. Today the dining hall is exactly that generous, if you let it be.

There's a kind of mothering in a full tray you didn't have to cook, in a friend's card covering yours when you left your wallet behind. Let yourself be nourished without doing math about whether you deserve it. The plan was built for exactly this.

The dining dollars ran out somewhere around the eleventh of the month, faster than the calendar suggested they should, and now the abundance has curdled into a grocery budget stretched thin across a floor mini-fridge and a box of instant noodles that's starting to feel less like a snack and more like a lifestyle. The Empress's table has emptied out early this time.

This is her warning, gently offered: generosity unmanaged runs dry, and running dry alone is harder than it needs to be. Someone would feed you if you let them know you needed it — the scarcity is real, but so is the friend two doors down with a full plan and an open door.