My Hunger, My Starvation :: My Shame, My Salvation

My hunger was long dead. I remember. It was prolonged and deliberate. Died when I was a single digit. I killed it with my mother's hatred and father's anger. It took its time to depart, and I made sure it was silent. It whinged a little during the nights under the low lights. I remember how the hunger fought back, clawing and howling, begging to be fed. It had small, short-lived moments of victory. 

As I grew, the starvation anchored me. The emptiness kept me up. And with it, I killed my appetite. I thought that was victory. I received compliments too! The absence of hunger and indifference towards consumption felt like control, like I’d finally tamed the wild beast inside me. But now, when I eat—when I let the smallest morsel pass my lips—it’s not hunger that returns. It’s something worse. 

It’s shame.

I went out to eat today. The emptiness inside me opens like a vortex, and the food tumbles into it, disappearing before I even realise what I’m doing. There’s no pleasure, no satisfaction—just the raw act of filling a void that never truly fills. And after I finished, I could not help but notice how beastly it was. Reflected in the knife’s edge or the gloss of a spoon. My gut, crouching behind my ribs, its jaws smeared with shame. I looked around, and it’s like suddenly a different world, one where I’m an outsider. I am sat at the table, the empty plate in front of me a gaping wound. 

The act of eating. Mechanical and humiliating. Like I unlearned how to eat when I killed hunger.

I killed my hunger, but I didn’t bury it. I starved my appetite, but I didn’t forget how to consume. Now I devour like an animal, and when I’m done, all that remains is the shame. It seeps into my skin, into my breath, into the very air around me.

Maybe now, all that’s left is the hunger and the shame. And me, somewhere in between. Or, right in the core of the vortex.

I starve because I think it will save me. I eat because I’m still human. But when I do, I remember why I stopped. I don’t know how to stop this cycle. I starve. I eat. I am ashamed. I starve again.

- Oizys.