There was a time I wandered through your garden,

starving.

And you—each of you—offered yourselves

as fruit swollen with promise.

I reached for you with cracked hands,

bit in with blind hunger,

and called the bitterness flavor.



You were beautiful.

God, you were beautiful.

But so is nightshade,

so is the blossom that blooms on the mouth of a grave.

Your sweetness was lacquered in arsenic,

your nectar dripped with need.

You tasted of almosts

and if-onlys

and don’t-you-dares

disguised as love.



I swallowed you whole.



Thank you for that.



Truly.

Because I needed the poison.

I needed to tremble.

I needed to wake at 3 a.m.

with my gut twisted into questions,

my lips still red from the lie.



You see,

each of you grew in soil watered by my self-doubt.

You thrived on my silence,

my contortion,

my careful pruning of self

to fit the shape of your hunger.



I tended you like a fool tends a ****,

thinking it would blossom into medicine.

But you were never sustenance.

You were spectacle.

And I—

I was the banquet host,

laying myself out

course after course,

watching you feast

and ask what else I had to offer.



No more.



The garden is closed now.



I’ve uprooted every vine

that once climbed my spine like a lover.

I’ve tilled the rot,

turned the decay into compost,

and from it—

from it—

a single fig tree has risen.

Quiet. Modest.

But true.



She feeds me.

Not with frenzy,

but with fullness.

Not with hunger,

but with presence.

Her fruit doesn’t burn.

It lingers.



So to each bitter harvest:

Thank you.

Thank you for sickening me.

For seducing me.

For starving me so thoroughly

that when love finally arrived,

I could taste it—

and know it was real.



You were never the feast.

You were the lesson.



And I am no longer hungry.



— Formerly Yours,

Now Fed