Tag: craving

There is a wolf in you, I’ve heard, or maybe even two of them. If that’s true, mine are hungry, always.

Once, there was a little girl who wanted to bite and claw at the world, to keep it close or drive it away or both at once. That little girl grew into a woman, and still she wants to bite and claw, nightmare creature, hungry-eyed. Her nails she keeps short, but she likes to think they could grip hard enough to bleed the world, even if only a little. But doesn’t everyone hope that? That if they really dug in, really dug down, they could tap into the well of lifeblood under the surface? That what’s stopping them from drinking it down is restraint, and not weakness?

There was a girl, and there is a woman, and their teeth are empty. Vegetarian, she only enjoys a bloody bite from jelly donuts, only tastes flesh when she chews her lips and cuticles.

She would like to be everything, thank you. Your best friend, your rival, your idol, your nemesis. She would like to be anything at all.

Most often she finds herself in cliched poems, outdated novels, old movies. She loves when they aren’t quite good–it gives her space to wedge into the gaps and live there, the ghost in the attic, the lurker in the walls. It is a rare chance for her to feel superior, by knowing she would have chosen differently than the author.

It is so easy to say “I see where you went wrong there.”

Right now, she is starving, awaiting validation, that better-than-flesh bite that fills her mouth, rich and savory. But validation is thin on the ground for most of those who write, or paint, or draw, or sing, or play. Poets and artists and musicians and crafters, actors and dancers and performers and yes, mimes too, I see you mimes. I know you’re hungry.

“If I were to sell out,” she often thinks. Or: “if I didn’t mind lying to people,” or “if I gave up everything but this, like the rich old men whose works I loved”, then it would bleed, thick and heavy, hot, coagulating, and I would bite it down. Bite, and bite, and bite, and never be an aching again.

But we all want to think that it’s restraint and not weakness that stops blood from being drawn.

[This post brought to you by the joined spirits of ‘eh, I’ll just write whatever comes to mind and post it’ and ‘even if it’s just written doodles, it’s better than AI!’.]