Hunger

It begins not with absence, but with presence — a presence of yearning, of desperate intention scrawled into the marrow. Hunger is not a call; it is a command whispered beneath skin and sky, a filament of heat threading through bone. You wake clenched. You rise coiled. Something is missing, and yet it is everywhere. A hollowness that pulses in the spaces between your thoughts, between the echoing clicks of time grinding ever forward.

It is not only the void in your stomach; it is also the void in your soul. The crack down the center that nothing ever fills, that you try to name only with movement, motion, momentum. You consume not to feed, but to reach. Food becomes symbol, symbol becomes longing. Lust slips into taste, taste into chase, and still the drumbeat continues: more. More. Never enough—because you are not yet what you should be. You are still unmade.

Hunger doesn't speak in words but in hauntings. It is the scent of something half-remembered on someone else's breath, the glare of eyes that see too much and know too little, the itch beneath your rib when you stare at quiet ceilings and beg for noise, for anything, for sustenance or salvation. You will tear pages from books and chew them. You will suck secrets from bruised lips and call it nourishment.

What do you think you want? What do you think you're hunting? Hunger doesn't care. It only drives. It wraps itself like vines through your gut, promising bloom even as it consumes the roots. And you let it. Oh yes, you welcome its whisper, because it burns, and you need to burn. You barter tenderness for bites. You trade your stillness for fire.

But hunger is also creation. The forge must be empty before it can make. From your ache, kingdoms rise. From your longing, voices scream into songs. You make meaning because you must, because the void stretches and you know it by name. You know you are more than animal—but not by much—and you prove it in your trembling resistance to feast. Still... not tonight. Still... not like that.

Hunger isn’t fed. Hunger is understood. It lives with you. Breathing. Taut. Waiting. Shimmering just below the surface of every desire, twisting every touch, every word, every dream—until nothing is simple, and everything, everything, tastes like longing.