Hunger

Nothing is sexier than a body cannibalizing itself

Ophelia by John Everett Millais

I used to starve. 

Some ex complained about the lack of flesh. My friends found the bones hot.  
Nothing is sexier than a body cannibalizing itself.

It's not that they had an ulterior motive. We weren't bulimic. Or we didn't think we were. Rather, they too were emptying themselves, starved bellies folding into their young bodies like quicksand. Not out of choice. Or at least I don't think so.

Blame it on hostel food, restaurant food, food that wasn't food like smokes and joints, food that ballooned a body, which burst under pressure, or sharp scrutiny. 

We were living off air. And youth.

The body can withstand a lot of shit when ensconced in youth, like a pearl weathering the stygian cold of the sea, weathering a weight greater than Atlas under his mountain. Youth is an elixir. Replace your lungs with ash and you'll still breathe. Replace your heart with the biting blood of first love, and it'll still beat. Anything is possible when young. Even wounds aren't that bad. It's just skin meeting itself again. Pretty. Unlike how it is later, pus and stench, an ache that haunts long after the wound has closed and retreated into skin.

But back then, we starved, willfully, merrily, while potbellied men masquerading as the lovers of our girlhood dreams, traced our smooth flat stomachs with their serrated tongues, leaving entrails of saliva, like a slug. We refused to shudder. Instead, we let them say all their words, words borrowed from porn, and occasionally a poet, and that was that. We filled their stomachs with our bodies, fed them our pickled bones, caressed them with our thinning hair, and drank their dripping love like it was the nectar of Gods.

We starved, while letting them travel their rough, thick hands across our quivering bones that jut out like the roots of a tree before it fell, and we called it love, no — the making of love, while our bodies unmade itself to keep itself made.

Such is the nature of hunger.

Not one of us noticed the other's hunger. All we saw were the men who called us girls and women in the same breath, who asked for pictures without skin, and touched themselves thinking it was us they were mutilating.

Not one of us thought to ask the other, does your stomach clench like a fist? Is there a howl trapped inside of you? Are you too a blood-thirsting, rabid carnivore?

We didn't. Not even when we confessed our anxieties about fucking. And then we congratulated ourselves on our modernity, thinking ourselves free now that we broke through the mesh of taboos. But not the sin of hunger. Sin.

Because hunger was second skin. We were used to wearing it well like a mad migraine. Take your pills. Drink your liters. Wash your skin. Lather your creams. And watch a body come alive, fresh as a newly bloomed bud.

Watch and we did. We did everything to erase the pimples, mask it under powders, to hide the screams of a body that twisted to be heard. 

We did it all, and still there were no buds. Only a body transforming into a coffin.

Yet we didn't say a word. Instead, we let our stomachs turn pillows, which the men beat their heads into, and buried their nightmares in.
Yikes.
What were we thinking?

Time revealed to us our buried crimes against ourselves.

When I look at us in pictures, I see blades. Sharp, glinting, glistening.
We cannibalized ourselves and called it womanhood.
Fuck.
What were we thinking?
What was I thinking?

In the months since the plague knocked on our doors and knocked us off our feet, one by one these hungry women disappeared. And so did the men who hungered for my pulsating emptiness. 

Now my hunger has a name: mine.  

Now, I patiently measure my ingredients, set the temperature, and silence the screaming void with joy, which is tender and soft, like freshly dug earth. 

I take a knife kissed by fire, and cut a slice out of the opulent and rich chocolate cake — birthed by my own hands — veined with velvety chocolate buttercream frosting. And as the first bite meets my tongue, floods my mouth, I feel the teeth in my belly soften, come loose, and my body shivers with delight, like a sapling cleaving through the womb into the sweet sting of light. 

The cake lasts a while; maybe a week. Which is nice, for when my hunger yearns, I dress my skin in veils of sunlight and pinch a moist bite with my fingers, my throat drowning the cake in waves, while my tongue resurfaces to lick the skin clean, now warm and sweet.