(if you told me this was) KAFKA’S LAMENT (i would believe you)

"The moment you put the bread between my lips, I was reminded of how hungry I have been for far too long. The wine was almost pouring from my half-closed mouth, and I let it fall, staining my chin and dripping down my shirt. You looked at me and said nothing, but the piece of bread in your hand started to rot, so I was the first to look away.

My head has been dizzy for way too long, and the smell of incense and people breathing was not helping me any. I turned to look upon them, figures with their heads covered and bent down in silent prayer, with their anger upon their sleeves even more crushing than before. That was the last time I ate before today, and yet..."

"Yet look at you now."

"The streets should not be this empty, even if it’s long before midnight. The paper cup in my hand used to be white, as white as my shirt that day, but I never quite managed to get the wine stain out of it and I think the same thing will happen to this cup. I don't like drinking, my teeth feel small and feeble whenever I do, and the taste of wine is worse than a lot of other types of alcohol, making my head a stranger place than usual.

I had to drink tonight, though, as everyone was there doing it, the same cups on their hands, with their names written on them by hurried hands and pressed shoulders. I think my cup should have a name on it too, but if it's mine, I've forgotten about it a long time ago."

"How was the party? Has your rot reached it yet?"

"Not that I saw, but I left before I got to take a good look. The hunger gets worse when there are voices around, especially when your mouth is stitched shut. At a certain point, a piece of the pavement outside the venue broke from the ground and stabbed my foot. I stopped the bleeding with a bottle of wine left around unsupervised, but the shards from it were just as cruel to my bones as the bits of Stone."

"You should sit down. You should smoke, and drink some more. Your mouth has been feeling lonely for so long, don't you want to numb it? Your heart has been beating so fast, don't you want to stop it?"

"Your voice will quiet down if I do so. But I think you're right, anyway. Have you noticed how my fingers start bleeding whenever I open a new pack of cigarettes? My skin blisters and the bumps feel like spiky spines on them. The first time I smoked a cigarette, I thought I was in love, but as the smoke coiled around my lungs and my throat clogged up, I was reminded that love is not for the likes of us.

His hands were big, and warm like the too-hot water of a filled tub you forgot about. Sometimes, there were tones of green and yellow in his eyes, and they matched the rot of my thighs when he held onto them for too long. I thought I was in love with the pain, but the only thing I loved was that I had an excuse for it."

"What was his name?"

"That's completely irrelevant, or it would be, if I remembered it. He is just my first cigarette now, him and his big hands and the cloak of pain I shrouded myself in whenever he was around. If I don't have a name, why should his memory have one? Back then, he would treat me to a lot of food, and cry copper and brime whenever I told him I couldn't eat. He would take those warm hands and wrap them around my lips until I choked and threw up and smiled through bloody pieces of meat and potatoes. I don't remember if he's ever told me that he's proud of me and what I became when I was around him, but I think he felt it when he held my body and pinched the fat on my sides with surprisingly cold-tipped fingers."

"Why do you call it love, when the memories of him speak more of painful dread?"

"He taught me a different kind of hunger. When we were together, my voice was quiet, but my body was screaming-- he used to press it down and dig his fingers under my skin as if he was looking for a real man under it, but could only find a girl hardly containing her sobs. When my eyelashes were not glued together with tears, I could see teeth springing up where the parts of his body united, and he scared me. But he was hungry, you see? He thought of my mind as an old, web-covered plate, and he would make me spill my guts on it so that he could feast upon a meal he could understand. Nonetheless, I don't think he was a bad guy, but one that wanted me to feel the same starving he did whenever he looked at me, and I just never quite managed. I don't think he was proud, after all, not when the teeth all over his body started blackening with a sickly blue color from disuse near the end."

"Have you ever felt that type of hunger, the one that he tried to teach you?"

"I've never quite had a stomach for it, and it took me a long time to come to terms with that fact. The thing he managed to do, though, is make me find out I was famished, but not in the same way he was. My teeth grew out of my heart, not from my body, and the veins of said teeth disconnected somewhere on their way toward my brain.

But that is another topic entirely, and you're already fading away as I grow more and more tired. Look, I will leave these last three smokes for you, and put you out in the puddle of piss or soda that is beneath my feet. I love this city, in spite and because of all its loud voices and strange substances— I love that there is pain I can borrow when mine becomes too much to handle by myself."

***

"You're back! It is sort of strange that you called upon me in a park and not on the dark streets on your way home, but I am not complaining."

"I have a story to finish, after all, and what sort of chef would serve a plate without its finishing touches? Not that I could ever be a chef, when food is one of the worst things that has ever happened to my body, to my soul or to my mind. When I was young, I used to go to church after school to do my homework and eat there. To this day, I cannot say for sure if the broth was salty because of the borsch or because of my tears, but that is just the spoiled child in me complaining, as he usually does whenever his voice is able to get out from amidst the rot.

I used to sing when I went to that church, we had some sort of chorus that would get together during winter and organize all sorts of festivities. My voice was small back then, but it was clear, so clear that the memory of it is transparent and I cannot say what it spoke of, I can only speak of how sometimes I feel it hard beneath my tongue and I start scratching at my throat to feel that solid surface, but to no avail. The power behind it must have rotted at the same time as my teeth."

"Is the story you want to tell me about this power?"

"Somewhat. As I mentioned, my stomach craves something different than what others' does. It took me a long time to find a name for this feeling, a lot of pressing my fingers all over my body in search for the physical manifestation of this need. But, of course, it is not there, at least not in a material form- this hunger wails with the need of touch, of comfort in its purest form, distant yet present enough to always know for sure it is there.

I have been a lonely man for a long while, probably one of the few things I have not told myself to be but that happened to me anyway. The games I used to play in my childhood always spoke of longing that is without a starting point or visible ending, and this translated into how I treated my relationships as I grew older, be them friendships or not. Some may say that the one I longed for was myself, but in reality the one I craved was someone who could fit inside my skin as neatly as I could inside theirs.

I was walking alone through the night city- that is not something that bothers me, you understand, but it gives me the time to think about the twists and turns inside my viscera and find names and colors to organize them by. That hunger grew and grew without a name or a color inside me for so long that I had to stop in my tracks in the middle of the street when it finally spoke to me- my fingers were numb and my lips strained against their stitches violently, as they haven't done in too long for me to remember."

"What did it say?"

"That it missed itself. Very strange, to hear a voice inside your own head telling you that it missed something that you didn’t even know was there. I was so used to feeling in pain, or lonely, or feeling nothing at all, that this confused the hell out of me, enough so that I had to find someplace secluded and think about what was happening. Before long, veins grew around my chest cavity and blossoms filled my mouth from the inside of my cheeks, making me choke on maroon blood and petals. This thing, this missing thing, it reminded me of a Japanese word — kuchisabishii. The feeling of your mouth being lonely, the longing to put something in your mouth. It translated differently to my body, as things usually do, and this kuchisabishii took over my entire being— I was feeling a different type of loneliness than I've ever experienced before, a longing of a touch that fills rather than empties, of a hand that caresses rather than pushes past."

"And have you ever found it? This feeling that you were looking for?"

"Sometimes, now that I knew what I was looking for, I would go and seek out a refuge from this emptiness that was going to take me over if not fed. But it is still a hunger, you know? And I was never good at feeding myself, no matter how gently or forcefully the hands that fed me pushed between my lips. I am starving myself right now, amidst these blades of grass and the blades of hunger spiking through my heart. I sometimes try to stave off kuchisabishii taking over by doing things that remind me of those who have no problem feeding me. I wear their clothes, I listen to music that reminds me of their warm chills, I go to places that have their names etched into the wood floorings and their blood mixed into the white paint of the walls. The sky is ever so brilliant when your eyes are blind, my love, don't you think?"

"I think you should eat. Please. You might get lost if the bread crumbs in your fits have already turned to dust."

"It might be a little too late for me. At least for now. When I am starving like this, everything around feels all more powerful, for it's like this is the last time I get to experience it. I think this is my power nowadays: not the one of strengthening my teeth until they become impenetrable, but that of keeping them even when the rot has already reached my brain.

This talk was supposed to be about what is hunger and how I experience it, but I'm afraid I'm already two thousand words in and all that I have for proof of even having said anything is that my teeth hurt from how hard I chewed on them and my cheekbones are numb with unshed tears. Do you think it's enough? Do you think this hunger that I've tried to describe is worthy of my voice, worthy of your eyes upon it?"

"There is nothing you can do about it now. Come on, light up a cigarette, ignore the purple stain of wine in the corner of your mouth, and don't let the hunger overtake you. Everything is done, and everything's been said. What happens next is too vast and complicated to think about on an empty stomach such as yours."

Nick, 22, somewhere from the land of myth and sorrow

A writer usually found in the lines between dream and waking, made out of instant coffee and plush cigarettes.