Our relationship with food is one based on hatred and lust, forced upon us like a past lover you can’t stop craving despite the scars they left behind. Some let it overpower them until six portions acts as one and they can’t help but notice ‘that look’ when old friends tell them they’re looking “well”. Others restrain themselves from the addiction, despite being constantly drained by the efforts of staying ‘clean’. And when you fall to your cravings, you feast as if it’s your last supper, as if that cupboard is your salvation, before realising that poison invades from behind a mask of redemption.
The feeling of hunger embraces the body to make you feel loved. You may be weak under the pain of emptiness, but at least you don’t have poison in your stomach making you think that you’re not pretty when you already ‘know’ that you’re not. At least you can say that you are thin as you cry on Instagram and avoid your own reflection. If only you had accepted looking “well”, you wouldn’t be left with the skeleton of the person you once were when you were in love…
Everyday we eat in order to be whole, in order for old friends to smile and say we look “well”. We eat in order to feel pretty so that one day our dads walk us down the aisle into the arms of a lover, instead of the cold arms of the earth. We enjoy every meal as if it is the last, only now with the knowledge that it won’t be. Finally we realise that love within poison is far less painful than lust within emptiness, and all along poison has been a metaphor for being alive…
We are alive.
