“….I couldn’t find a food that tasted good to me.”

She found her calling early in life. About 11. Maybe 12.
She’d been a performer all her life, in plays. But never enough.

I don’t know how or where the idea slipped into her.
The Buddha. Jesus. Yom Kippur. The Media. Her friends.

I doubt it was Kafka but all possibilities.  
Hunger art is the purest form she said.  And she was good at it.

At first we would watch her with our mouths agape.
Sometimes we’d even sit for a meal. Right in front of her.
Pass the salad I’d say.  Dad would reach for the salt.
Her eyes ablaze like an ascetic’s. But not paying us much attention.

Only when we turned away would she turn her gaze on us.
In her prime she could go for days. Weeks even.  
And make it seem like nothing more than the gap between lunch and dinner.

It was transformation that she hungered for. A lessening.  A denial of self.
A thinning. Because the cleanest lines are none at all.

But we didn’t know that.  We thought it was just a phase.
And kept telling ourselves that even as she sank deeper.
Into her art.  Her unself.  Into ether.

There was a reckoning at some point, an event horizon of sorts.
In which the harder she pushed the less was achieved.

And so she died unsatisfied.