The fading hues of amber felt wasted on the unenthused office bodies that were making the mass migration back over the Harbour Bridge. The sky was a freeing reminder signalling the working day was done and evening routines of equally habitual comfort awaited us.
We crossed the same bridge. Only a few glanced up, almost to check if anything had changed. Many didn’t bother. 40 years in the same job and so much had changed, yet nothing really had.
“It’s a good day when I forget my packed lunch”.
The world had shifted its axis but we had evolved and taken our routines with us. Change came in ripples rather than ruptures and it was often unabashedly welcome. Fears became water cooler chat, the unexpected became the morning meeting and everyday failures became dinner conversation. Enough to discuss but never enough to disarm.
Kids? “Good”
Wife? “Good”
School? “Expensive”
Groceries? “Expensive”
Life? “Can’t complain”
We didn’t seem to care; it was ignorance from some, the privilege of many and the surety of the lap we knew we’d run again, again and again.
We jostled up the ramp as shoulders fell and heads hung. The work of the day was dropped and the respite for even a moment meant distraction or dissociation. Looking up through the bus window the view felt private, shared with only an alternating few. Casual magic. I had watched the skyline dress itself many times, sometimes blindingly bold, sparkling against the “pretty” city, other times blanketed in a mute grey, as if to deter the view of even the few on or up-lookers. Today it welcomed me into its familiar arms but knew I was just passing by and our time shared would be blurred into the many that had come before.
I often sit on the bus hungry, having not wanted to waste the joy and money of good food in the dry office environment. Having swallowed that dryness instead, I feel it on my tongue and sit with the wretched stench of my own breath reverberating through my hollow body. Giving me a foul breath and a foul mood. Relishing in skylines, sunsets and the smell of train station delicacies, I turn to my music as I transit, the energy often at odds with the realities of the contexts I am in. Listening as a sign of hopefulness, as if the musics’ melodic movement will spur my own to craft new realities rather than the one I am sat in – hungry.
I am hungry. Always. I have an appetite and it rarely is satiated. It doesn’t subside, it just shifts. The object of desire and consumption switches and my focus is filed down to the edible. What is mine for the taking, what is ripe and ready for the plucking? I don’t hunger for food alone, I constantly have an appetite for anything that will fill me up in the impossible search for satisfaction.
On the bus, I fantasise about all the things I don’t or may never do, detailing elaborate recipes in a meticulous fashion for how I will sustain the hunger for passion, creativity, labour and life. I often find myself questioning the states I find myself in and whether I enjoy them or have just become accustomed to them. A hard distinction to make when you find pleasure in the feeling of hunger itself.
Encased in the hardened skin of habitual ways it becomes hard to taste the very flesh that builds a life. Flesh and skin are two parts of a whole and you cannot have one without the other but with the peel alone I would not be content. I want the skin, the flesh, the juice and all the seeds. The weight of the laden fruit, heavy in my hand, prizing away the skin, digging nail into flesh to reap the glorious guts. To consume it dripping down my arm and chin. The sticky fluid coating me as a reminder of what I have achieved, as I spit out the seeds and savour the taste that can only be won after peeling, plucking and purveying each piece.
What are you starving for if you’ve never been full?
Once I am full. I feel sick. I have squashed the appetite. To be hungry is to be driven. Being in a state of hunger is a form of control against conformity. Physically and psychologically dominating the lingering form of submission to a satiation, a resignation; the inevitable end.
