On Hunger.

You go to bed dreaming of eggs. Two white and yellows slipped from the pan onto a hunk of sourdough with slabs of butter. You are hungry. You are always fucking hungry. It arrives, this ravenousness, on a day you can’t remember - did it bloom in adolescence when suddenly eating became criminal and conscious? Or it was always there - since you were girlish and frocked, playing in the garden, talking to the fairies. Nevertheless, time unknown, it muscles in, shoulder against the door - like a houseguest that refuses to leave. Like the friend-of-a-friend at a dinner party who arrives empty handed, and drinks the last of the good wine.

Your hunger robs you of peace. It robs you of free thought. It robs you of sleep. Insidiously, it clouds your days. All else is merely a distraction from it: the nine-to-five, the evening run around the neighbourhood, the self-development podcasts, the moments spent staring at your reflection in a passing windowpane or brushing your teeth. It becomes a steady presence in your life - like air, like breath. But less airy, less breathy - more cloying. More thick.

It shapes the force of your day - its listless, incessant rhythms. It whispers to you. Often, it shouts.

You wonder: is your hunger speaking to you of something more profound? Something pathological? Hormonal? Psychological? Spiritual? What part of you cannot be sated? Is it calling to you, from the depths of your psyche - a wound in waiting; the past exerting its sickly force on the now. Is it idling, waiting to ambush, like a foul leopard in a dark bush, its breath stinking of old blood, its maw grisled and scabbed. Is it the thing that is coming for you - that will one night rouse you at 3:53, breathless and panting, as you remember. Is it a signpost to that unnamed thing that you wilfully ignore? To a pain that you suffocate with scones and late-night granola.

Whatever it is, it exerts a force that moves you forward - a propulsive energy that turns you head over toe, head over toe, cartwheeling into the next day and the next. Like a hungry hamster on a wheel, its feet clicking till eternity. Its manic imbalance somehow stabilises the spinning out of your life - an energy both brutal and bracing.

You go to bed, dreaming of eggs. You wake up, dreaming of dinner. The roll of the day fatted on the thought of the four post-supper blocks of bittersweet chocolate that you will suck to your palate. Suck until your spittle is thick and sweetened, exerting on you an inexorable pleasure that tingles and peaks, liberating you from consciousness, like an orgasm.

You are hungry. You are always fucking hungry.

In the night you wake, your chest sweaty. Legs caught up in the sheets, you kick them free, trying to claw away from the babbling brain drivel: shopping list, cat food, water bottle, clean car, phone bill, dead dad, cousin’s christening. No matter. Soon, the telltale tweet of the midnight bird will give way to the creeping crawl of the morning: traffic and footfall and car horn and child’s call. And then the unknowable hum - the urban white noise. The dawning will come, and with it the yawning, tiresome cavern of the day: computer screens and small talk and pen clicks; life’s general anaesthetic. But the eggs - at least you will have the eggs.

You wonder, if your hunger is the thing that keeps you alive. Keeps you moving. Without it, would everything come to an end? Perhaps then, to be so terribly hungry is not such a terrible thing.

Photo by sara ghasemi on Unsplash