There’s food in the fridge rotting. Every week I plan for the 3 meals a day I am supposed to eat, for an ever optimistic snack, and every week I eat the same yogurt for breakfast, 2 eggs on toast for a far too late lunch, and whatever my husband can feed me in the evenings.
There is half a steak in the fridge rotting. I accidentally left it out on the counter overnight when I sealed it up in utter defeat. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out. Couldn’t live with the waste. Couldn’t live with how I am wasting in a body I can never seem to sufficiently feed.
Thinking about food and feeding myself makes me feel like a caged animal. It makes me feel like the underresourced mother of a screaming child. I want the child to stop screaming. I want the child to feel loved and cared for and nourished. I want not to have to be the one who dispenses these things.
I want someone else to step in and take care of me. Feed me, bathe me, close my eyelids and massage my muscles into soft, supple surrender. But when they do, like a capricious god, I cut their offering in half and leave the rest to rot.
I do not know how to receive love, how to allow care, any more than I know how to supply it.
Such things feel an unfair burden. They feel like a locked door. Behind it, all the things I wish were not mine because owning them makes me responsible, liable. I want to burn it all down and be free. I want to burn myself down.
For years, I was voracious. Nothing really scraped the surface of me; almost like my nerves had been chewed on by squirrels until they could no longer conduct electricity properly. I gorged myself on food, sex, love, violence, and then resumed my disembodied state—returned to wandering the dark corridors of myself without care for the distant screams.
Now, I am always too full. Full of life, full of love, full of poetry. Full of grief, full of layaway pain, full of every cut from a knife I did not feel.
I never truly learned to rest, only to distract myself from the exhaustion.
If everything feels exhausting, I must not really be tired, right?
No one could tell me because no one was asking.
No one was wondering why steroid injections left dark, mysterious pits where muscle used to be. No one was curious why my thick, luscious hair was covering the floor like an erratically woven web. No one was concerned that I was dragging around a carcass that rattled with a tiny, shriveled soul—consciousness too remote to be reached, too untethered to be secured under the skin where it belonged, ping-ponging back and forth at the bottom of this empty cup.
Everyone was always angry at me for haunting them. I was a light flickering on in the kitchen when you’ve already gone to bed, the rattle of a doorknob when you’re waiting for a goodbye, the rumbling of a car engine outside your bedroom window, a call that never came, an unknown location, an unanswered text message.
I was a ghost in my own home and no one wondered why. They just wanted me to breathe life back into myself with tar drenched lungs. I was filled with crushed glass and they wanted me to be less sharp, to stop crackling.
I wanted these things, too, but I didn’t know how to return to the land of the living. If I did, I would have to leave this family behind. No one had been living there for a long time.
I guess I was floating through purgatory and they wanted me to join them in the underworld. I let their pomegranate rot, too.
Now, I am learning how to be full. I am full of dreams. I am full of images. I am full of sensations. I am full of the light on my skin and the wind through my outstretched fingertips. I am full of the rich red behind my eyelids that slowly fades to black if I can resist the urge to twitch back into ceaseless movement.
I am putting down the phone instead of avoiding this fullness—feeling around for a stopper chain so I can finally drain me.
The food still rots but I am no longer rotting. I am germinating like mint in open soil. I am spreading out in all directions like land is disappearing—like they’re no longer making it. I am neither forcing this process nor blocking it. I am simply trying to place careful sticks and tie all my trembling shoots in place; creating some sort of boundaries. Facilitating growth.
The food rots but I am still fed. I am doing my best to fertilize myself with something other than astral pomegranate—the fruits of my imagination, my hopeful yearning.
I am doing fine.
Special thanks to Adriana Michelle for supporting this publication. <333
“No one could tell me because no one was asking.” The pain, the hurt, the truth, the loneliness, the acceptance, the desire, the grief, the strife. Let me come back to this when I can articulate myself better because I’m about to be bawling over here with every goddamn line. That’s all.
love this so much <3