Hell Is a Hungry Girl
(Tantalus, Revised)
Pink box in the backseat and my fingers are in my mouth and I am not being delicate about it. Sugar. The particular sweetness of something cheap and pink and falling apart. Crumbs in the corners of my mouth and I am getting every last one and I am not thinking about you at all, which is true, which is real, which is the whole poem, really.
I want to tell you something ugly. I want to open the coat and show you. The Catholics have confession and I have this: you, reading, nowhere to go. Bless me. Here is what I used to do with my body.
I used to take a person and make them god. Quietly. Without telling them. I'd hand over the whole thing. The gavel. The weather. The truth of me. And then watch their face for the verdict the way you watch for the diagnosis, the way you wait for the results, parsing every glance, every laugh, every text and the time before the text, lying awake with the temperature of a room, a pause, a door that closed a certain way; running my entire self through another person's nervous system and calling it love. When they shone I bloomed. When they didn't I rotted from the inside, soft and dark and quietly, where no one could see. I had confused need with love and love with proof and proof with the only thing standing between me and the suspicion I carried in my teeth for years, never once said out loud: that without someone choosing me I did not quite exist. That I was only ever as real as whoever was looking at me.
I thought that was just love. I thought everyone was quietly this afraid, quietly this dependent on the temperature of another person's mood, quietly this far from themselves. I thought devotion was supposed to feel like drowning slowly and calling the water warmth.
There are photographs. You can see it. The lights off behind the eyes. Just a girl standing in other people’s weather, face tipped up, waiting.
You’re beautiful. I really see you. I love you. I pick you. I—
And when it came I took it into my mouth and it dissolved before I could taste it and I was already hungry again. There is a man in hell like this. Tantalus. Standing neck-deep in water that drops away every time he bends to drink, fruit hanging at his mouth that lifts every time he reaches. Forever. The thing you need most, right there, and then not, and then right there again, close enough to taste, never close enough to keep. I was so hungry. I was always so hungry and the hunger had a name and the name was not love, it was the thing underneath love, the ugly wet root of it, the thing that had taken another person and made them the load-bearing wall, hadn't told them, would never tell them, and when they moved, the way people move, just living, just turning away to look at something else, I felt the whole structure come down and stood in it completely wrecked, completely responsible, completely unable to have done anything differently.
I was so young. I was so hungry. I didn’t know those were different things.
I never let you be a person.
You were a slot machine and I was the woman in front of you at 2am, mascara somewhere it shouldn’t be, both hands full of quarters, watching the wheels with my whole body clenched around the hope of it. One more. One more. I needed you to be proof that I was real, that I was the kind of thing worth wanting, and so you couldn’t be a person, you could only be evidence, a lifeline, a mirror I was screaming into, the thing I held onto so hard I called the grip love and the desperation devotion and I bent myself into whatever shape I thought would make you stay and I am telling you now because I think you deserve to know what was actually happening in that room, what I was actually doing, what I was actually asking you to be.
And I wonder—now that I don’t need saving— whether you liked me better desperate. Whether the hunger was the part you loved. Whether what you wanted was a woman so hollowed out by needing you that you could feel it coming off her like heat, like something that would actually die without you, and you could be the thing that kept it alive, and wasn’t that something, wasn’t that a reason to stay. Whether now I am harder to love because I am harder to save. Whether the woman I was then, the one who would have burned everything down just to stay close to your warmth, was the one worth keeping. Whether she is just not the same thing.
I sit with that. Longer than I'd like. I sit with that.
I want things constantly. Hungrily. Your mouth. The weight of your attention. The light going gold through dirty glass and the first cold morning and the particular smell of October… I want all of it and the wanting moves through me like weather and I feel it fully and I walk away. I walk away full. Into my own life which is full of days and people and the sweetness of a Tuesday and none of it is organized around your warmth, none of it depends on whether you turn toward me or away, none of it requires you at all.
I want you without needing you.
I spent years not knowing those were different things. I am not sorry I know now.
There was a man last week. Pharmacy line. I was on a sugar high, powder probably on my shirt, standing in my body like I’d been doing it my whole life, like it was the most ordinary thing, like the body was somewhere I lived and not somewhere I was waiting to be evicted from. He looked at me. Said I was the most beautiful thing he’d seen all week and meant it and I felt it (I want to be honest, I felt it, warm and real, something opening) and then I was just standing there again.
I used to take something like that home and eat it slowly in the dark. Ration it. Hold it up at 2am and whisper see, see, this is proof, this is what you are—
I was starving and I didn’t know it. I was standing outside my own body rattling the handle and handing the key to strangers and wondering why I was always cold.
Not confidence, what I have now. Or not only. More like faith. More like the dark kitchen at midnight, reaching for the glass without turning the light on: the hand just knows, the body just knows, the body was here the whole time keeping count in the dark while I was somewhere else looking for someone to tell me I was allowed to come home.
The body kept the count. The body held the door. The body said I’m here, I’m here, I’ve always been here, and I kept not hearing it, and it kept saying it anyway.
If you knew me five years ago we are strangers and I mean that the way you mean a scar that’s finally closed, not gone, not forgotten, just not open anymore. I have become someone I don’t have a name for yet. I catch her sometimes in a window, in a photograph, in a car with sugar on her fingers, and I think oh— there she is, there I am, and it doesn’t feel like triumph, it feels like recognition. Like coming into a room and finding the lights already on.
Pink box in the backseat. I open it. I take what I want and I taste it fully, the sweetness of it, the cheapness of it, how it is both at once, and I lick my fingers clean and I leave the rest and I go
into the afternoon which is going gold without my permission, without my input, without needing me to be okay or ready or grateful…
the light just does what light does.
And I am in it. And I am hungry. And I am already reaching for the next thing.
