I’ve let myself live on almosts and maybes, on quiet alarms I’ve trained myself to ignore; my body knocks soft, then softer, then silence… Till I couldn’t hear hunger knocking anymore.
Survival stitched armor out of my rib cage taught me that needing was something to hide… That emptiness meant I was doing it “right,” so I swallowed the signals that lived deep inside.
It isn’t quite fear and it isn’t just anger, it’s a ghost of a feeling that lingers too long like standing in sunlight, but feeling no warmth… Like knowing the lyrics, but losing the song.
I shrink all my wants into something manageable; filed them away in a drawer marked “later,” but “later” kept stretching to somewhere unreachable. And I became both the jailer and the traitor.
Now hunger feels foreign, like someone else’s language… a word on my tongue, I can’t quite translate. It flickers and fades like a half remembered dream… arriving too quiet or always too late.
And I don’t know what to call this becoming… This careful unraveling dressed up as control… This war with a body that begged me for mercy while I kept mistaking its cries for a role.
But somewhere beneath all the silence, I practice, a pulse still insists I am more than this ache… A rhythm, a drum beat, a soft reclamation: “you’re allowed to be fed, you’re allowed to take.” ♥️
Mar 27
Mar 27, 2026 at 9:35 AM UTC
I’ve let myself live on almosts and maybes, on quiet alarms I’ve trained myself to ignore; my body knocks soft, then softer, then silence… Till I couldn’t hear hunger knocking anymore.
Survival stitched armor out of my rib cage taught me that needing was something to hide… That emptiness meant I was doing it “right,” so I swallowed the signals that lived deep inside.
It isn’t quite fear and it isn’t just anger, it’s a ghost of a feeling that lingers too long like standing in sunlight, but feeling no warmth… Like knowing the lyrics, but losing the song.
I shrink all my wants into something manageable; filed them away in a drawer marked “later,” but “later” kept stretching to somewhere unreachable. And I became both the jailer and the traitor.
Now hunger feels foreign, like someone else’s language… a word on my tongue, I can’t quite translate. It flickers and fades like a half remembered dream… arriving too quiet or always too late.
And I don’t know what to call this becoming… This careful unraveling dressed up as control… This war with a body that begged me for mercy while I kept mistaking its cries for a role.
But somewhere beneath all the silence, I practice, a pulse still insists I am more than this ache… A rhythm, a drum beat, a soft reclamation: “you’re allowed to be fed, you’re allowed to take.” ♥️
