Hunger (noun): a craving or urgent need for food or a specific nutrient; an uneasy sensation occasioned by the lack of sustenance.

She calls to tell you that she’ll be late to your birthday party. You’re already walking down to the restaurant with a group of people, none of whom you ever really made an effort to get to know. It’s the first party you’ve ever held for yourself. Someone is taking photos on a digital camera and you don’t know whether the occasion is reason enough for you to smile with your teeth this time. You’ve corralled together people from concentric social circles. Anyone who wanted to come was welcome, which is your way of addressing the fact that you don’t know enough people to fill the length of the table out in front of the venue with the people who did turn up. When she arrives, she buys you a drink and wishes you a happy birthday. You say thank you, clink your glasses.

The rest of the night, the sole pervading thought: in five years none of you will remember me.

–

You watch the bird get run over by a red Citröen in a supermarket parking lot. He’s gone into the supermarket to get something for dinner. Two cars have plowed into the mangled puddle of feathers. He might’ve been the one to flatten it in the first place.

–

It’s two o’clock in the morning and he is asleep on the couch beside you. You’re watching a documentary about seabirds. You watch as a pelican heaves up a stomachful of fish and feeds it to its chicks. You watch as one forces its way into its parent’s mouth and scurries for the remains.

This is not your house. This is not your living room. You have ownership over very few things, certainly not enough to consider selling anything off to someone else. Even if you had to, what would you offer? What of yours could be someone else’s sustenance?

–

He kisses like he’s searching for something you keep stored in the back of your throat, a cool, dry place, hollowed out for safekeeping.

–

Deer are the only mammals capable of fully regenerating an appendage. Every year a deer will shed and regrow its antlers. You imagined a deer dragging its discarded antlers through a clearing in a forest or up a steady incline. You imagined a deer bereft of its crown like Samson of his hair, desperately cleaving to that which has already been lost, oblivious to the fact that, unlike so many things which are lost, it would one day return.

–

You have no stories of your own to tell. You have no experiences from which to draw. Instead, it is always the act of listening in on the conversation taking place in the room into which you are not permitted entry. It’s always the act of catching a microexpression as it dances its way across someone’s face before they repress it. It is always, like many things, an act of climbing. You climb your way into someone else’s head, sort through the files, forward them to your own mailing address. You climb into someone else’s bed and commune with their dreams, stare down their fears, hear their sorrows. You climb into the cold body of water and don’t wait to adjust to the temperature before you begin to swim.

–

You swallowed a five-cent coin because you thought he would find it funny. He did not find it funny. Later, you go to the bathroom and dry heave until you hear the coin ping against the ceramic of the toilet bowl.

–

The most pervasive of intrusive thoughts: raw meat. There was a slab of mincemeat on the kitchen table. Someone was getting ready to make hamburgers. There was no one else in the house, so you went around the table and dug your hands into it. It was cold, heavy and fibrous, like clay. You let it ooze out from between your fingers, tested the tensile strength of the marbled strands. You could eat it all now, you thought, you really could.

–

Later, you would think about cutting him open. I need to see, you thought, I need to be sure that on the inside we are both made of the same ingredients, and that that should’ve, could’ve, been enough.

–

Someone at a party is telling you about their dead friend. All you can think about is how desperately you need a cigarette. He was in a car accident and you desperately need a cigarette. He hadn’t had a drop to drink but his friend who was driving was drunk and you desperately need a cigarette. This is the kind of conversation you need a cigarette for. This isn’t the kind of conversation you wanted to have tonight.

–

He has to ask you what the word 'appetitive’ means. You explain that it concerns an attempt to satisfy bodily desire. Plato divided the soul into three distinct parts, you say, one component of which was ‘epithymetikon’, or the appetitive soul. According to Plato this is the part of the soul that seeks out food, drink, sex, money, and is located in the stomach and abdomen. “So, like here?” he says, and touches you. You bat his hand away and say “yes, right there.”

–

You have no palate, no refined taste, no inclination towards any cuisine. Food is something you put in your body, like petrol into a vehicle. There is no feeling beyond that. In many ways, you were born bereft of hunger. Or perhaps the hunger disappeared, dwindled, snuffed out like a candle that was never meant to be lit.

–

The days begin to slump into one another. The sun goes up and down like a shrug of the shoulders. There is no goal, no endpoint, no version of your life towards which you are progressing, or that you might’ve been able to imagine in dreams. The first believable thought you have before breakfast: I will not live to see myself turn thirty. We will only ever live to see the world go up in flames.

–

He always looked better in certain kinds of light. Think of him early in the morning, shaving in the bathroom mirror. Think of him asleep on the grass in his backyard, the sun moving its way across his body as it sets like a slow-motion searchlight. Think of him bathed in the fluorescent glow of the open refrigerator while you watch him from the couch. Think of him turned away from you, as if already preparing to make his exit.

–

Three years later you think of calling her. You want to tell her that you’re sorry you weren’t a better friend. You want to tell her that almost nothing has changed, about how you wish things could’ve turned out differently. You wish you had something to show for yourself, that by now you’d be closer to knowing where you were going and what you were doing.

–

You don’t call. No-one calls. The day goes on eating itself.