Slaves to gluttony.

I want everything, and I have nothing.

Fruit gummy bears for dinner, the sugar makes me nauseous. Sugar has always tasted like something else—guilt, sin, a reminder that some things I never deserved. I cannot comprehend how, so I eat anyway. I eat until my teeth hurt, until I can take no more. I've been eating grief for as long as I remember. I've found there is no way out of it. There are some things you cannot love your way out of, contrary to what I've been believing all these years. All my beliefs feel like a fragile rope, breaking day by day. One day I ought to fall down. But hope is the only proper way to be. Believing is living; it's refusing to succumb to all the nothingness that surrounds us. Such a hope is courage, and a nihilist is a coward. No matter how it tastes or feels, sugar is hope. Eating grief is believing that there's an end to it, believing that if I keep eating, one day it will vanish. One day I will be without this lump in my throat, fog in my chest, and sorrow in my heart.

I drink lots of water after to wash out the taste, but it's already inside of me. I've already succumbed to gluttony, that sugar stuck in my throat, grief in my stomach. I wish to throw up. I want to vomit the grey out, but that's not how it works. I've always been this stubborn, cunning, naive, and I've always wished for impossible things to happen. I believed bad things wouldn't happen to me because I was good. I worshipped God, I prayed every chance I got, and I listened to my mother, but they happened anyway. They happened again, again and again, until bad things left stains on my body and I realised my stubbornness, naivety would take me nowhere, until I stopped believing in two things I thought would keep me safe—God and my mother.

I bid farewell to both of them when I was eleven. They're strangers to me now, they speak in each other's voice. God sounds like my mother, and a god has no child. I was never a little girl but a torn-apart, unholy flesh of hers, growing older like a rebel while her skin remained wounded. I could never hate her. How could someone love their own ruin? I wouldn't either. Maybe that's why we don't love each other. God and her are just the same, they refuse to treat me as their own. I refuse to belong to them—an endless agony, an ever-going war.

The next thing I do is cry. I count years on my fingers. I happen to be seventeen now. Maybe I shouldn't have eaten those sugar gummies, but I'm not old enough to understand what matters to me. I've been seventeen and vague since forever. All I seem to do is destroy and desire, harm and run away, eat and dream of eating.

My blood is feral and my actions devilish, completely out of control, all driven by desires to have more than what my fingers could hold. I want to have everything in a way that they don't slip through the cracks between my fingers. I want to consume everything, make a shrine for all I love inside the nothingness in my chest, the void in my bones.

The night is alive today—moon shining, winds whispering, leaves rustling. I try to listen to the air. As a little kid, I thought trees talked through the winds. Sometimes when I've had enough of crying, I try to listen to them, try to guess what they might have been talking about. All I hear is them mourning the dead peepal tree, the heart-shaped tree they cut down as if it was nothing. I hear the trees wondering how a life could be taken away that easily.

The cold winds brush past my lips. I open my mouth. I want to swallow the air and the cold, the moonlight too. I want to have all the pleasant things, keep them like I keep this sorrow with me. I want to be a black hole and suck everything I've ever loved into it. I suppose gluttony is my only way. I think I am a hollow vessel. I think if someone kissed me, I would echo and turn to dust. Still I open my mouth, still I desire. After all, I'm only seventeen. I'm only driven by the hunger to have. And I have nothing but divine emptiness. If you touch me, you'll sink in. You would hold my fingers, just my fingertips slightly touching, and you'll say I feel warm, but we both know I echo like a hollow vessel, and you would never hold my hand like hands were supposed to be held. We're both afraid of too much and too little. The air's too little too. The air touches my tongue and quickly passes by.

I breathe in. I try to pull the cold into my mouth. I want to quench my thirst, but I suppose you cannot have air. I suppose I cannot eat the air. No water caters to the thirst in the back of my throat, and gluttony has always been the only way to be. Still I hope. Still I stay hungry.

I hope like the hungry dog, like the polka-dotted dog in my neighborhood runs behind every truck that passes by. He thinks all those trucks killed his mother. He thinks his mother's corpse lies sucked into the tyres. The tyres and his mother both were pitch black. He runs with the hunger to have, with a thundering heart. He's a man's best friend—the man who killed his mother. He knows no better. He runs for his mother; he runs for a corpse. But the man with a stick knows he runs for no one, he barks for no one. His mother is dead. And the only way to be for him is the hunger to have, the thunder to run. He's as hungry as I am, as greedy. He runs to eat too, to have, for sugary revenge.

I know nothing I possess will make up for everything I've lost. Still I want. And so he knows nothing he runs for will give him back what he lost. Still he runs—a slave to gluttony, the hunger to have, the desire to fill the void. But we're still here, him and I.

He was barking again a few minutes back. Some truck must've passed. I am here with my mouth open. I don't remember the last time breathing came easily to me. I sometimes choke on deep breaths, a mass of crystallized tears in my throat, and a thirst that doesn't want anything except the cold air. I wonder if I spent my whole life wishing for things I cannot have, wishing for impossible things, wanting to have things that do not belong to me.

There are no stars in the sky today. I remember a dream. I had a dream last night—I dreamt of home. I dreamt of the tree cut down, the yellow bird I never saw again, of mangoes. I dreamt of someone telling me, "Close your eyes and all the stars will be yours."

I said nothing. I kept dreaming. I saw the moon. I saw a girl writing letters. She couldn't see me, I was nothing to her. She closed her eyes and she says she sees the stars, but I try to close my eyes and all there is is empty blackness, a vast canvas of nothingness. I woke before I could ask her how to see the stars.

She's younger and wiser than me, perhaps twelve, and she would say, "One must find the stars on their own." But she's just a dream. I will let her words pass straight through me.

I think I will wait for someone real to teach me how to see the stars again. I think I will curl up against my own body like a caterpillar in the hopes of waking up as a butterfly.

For now, there is nothing that I can have. The grief I've eaten seems to be eating my insides like termites. I thought cold winds would save me, shelter me, but there are some things I cannot have after all, some impossible things. I suppose I'm old enough to know that.

I think all I desire now is to be okay—a wild desire of someone who's seventeen and cannot be anything else. And I need someone real to tell me everything will be okay. Everyone I've ever known is a fragment of lies I tell myself.

I often tell myself three lies as soon as I wake up: today will be different, I've stepped into light, I still have everything I've lost. Three lies for waking up every day. They don't work anymore. I need someone else to lie to me. I need gentleness. I need soft whispers, a bed of lies. I want it to feel as though I am being put six feet under the ground, my body held together in other hands, all accountability someone else's. I want to not possess the need to keep my bones and flesh together. I want it to become someone else's job.

And I want someone real to do it. Not someone I know. They're not real enough, they don't know how fragile my corpse can be, how cowardly I can become. I do not want them near. I don't want them anymore. I want someone real instead, someone who vanishes into thin air, someone who has no business keeping me alive. Everyone I've known has failed me terribly. We're all graveyards of each other. None of us had the courage to keep each other. I wish I had the courage to succumb to my own vastness and find a place for all my loves to be, but I've failed. I've been failed. I keep you in the pages of my diary. We're all pressed flowers in each other's pages.

I wonder if, in the end, only flowers are remembered. I never gave them any. I wonder if my existence turned into ash and dissolved in the air, since no one has a flower to remember me by. Do they think I am real no more?

The night is alive , the moon getting brighter, sleep taking over my eyes. I don't know the end to this. I think I'll wait for someone real to tell me when grief leaves, when I finally get to have something pleasant, something quiet and cold as the air, when I am more than a slave to gluttony, when I am someone outside this body.