HUNGER: part three of her working biography

Sometimes she didn't wear a bra when she went out places. She thought that perhaps the nicest thing about living one's day-to-day life in a woman's body was feeling that little jiggle of soft flesh when you moved. She liked a little jiggle with her movement. And she supposed she didn't really need a bra, at least not in the sense that some women needed one. Her breasts were small and she was actually more comfortable, in a practical, earthy sense, without one. She really only wore them for the push-up and perk-up they provided. She liked the way a good push-up could round out her top, making her clothing drape down over her in that soft way unique to round, doughy women. She thought that some women might be offended or insulted by the term doughy, but she liked it. It was a warm, hearty word. It tasted good in her mouth when she said it. Doughy. It meant soft, malleable, rich. Dough swelled with anticipation of heat. And then when exposed to that heat, it shamelessly imbibed the energy and blossomed into something that had the potential to fill all the senses with flavor or, at the very least, to get a reaction from those who encountered it.

For her things always existed at this most personal, intimate, bodily level. That was the way she felt and experienced things--all kinds of things. This was very personal and it wasn't really something she could share easily with other people. She counted on those few people in her life to just feel along with her through a warm, comfortable silence. She craved understanding and to be understood. She supposed life really was mostly just about hunger. She hungered to be listened to and questioned and listened to some more.

There were all different kinds of hunger. Hunger for food, yes, but also for knowledge, compassion, understanding, love, anger, pain, joy, comfort and any and every thing, feeling, or experience that one could crave, and all of this psychic hunger was always felt and experienced at the most basic bodily level. Yes, she supposed life really was mainly about hunger. You hungered for something, and maybe you'd be satiated. You'd get to taste something, savor it if you wanted, and then inevitably you'd shit it away and the hunger would start again. Maybe for more of the same, maybe for something else, or maybe you always hungered for something you could never have. Regardless, when you stopped hungering for things, that's when you'd die.

STUFF: part two of her working biography

She owned lots of stuff. Mostly dishes, clothes and an assortment of kitschy knickknacks. If you opened any of her drawers or cupboards anywhere in her tiny apartment, you would likely come across a plethora of knickknacks stacked and shoved unceremoniously away. Her shelves were stacked with boxes brimming with more stuff. Old photographs, letters, cards, school papers and other miscellaneous papers that she didn't really know what to do with but couldn't bear to part with. Really when it came right down to it, she lived in a dusty fire hazard. This wasn't terribly unusual, she supposed. Lots of people had lots of stuff. People made livings out of carving out pathways in the homes of pack-rats. She had seen plenty of TV shows about this very topic back when she used to get more than five basic channels. She knew she wasn't nearly as hopeless as those poor slobs on the TV. But still.

LOVE: part one of her working biography

She wondered what it would feel like if for once the person she loved was the same person she wanted in her bed. She ached to know what it would feel like to be in love. She had known what it felt like to have someone be in love with her. It scared her and so she ignored it. She seemed to do that with most things that were frightening. She didn’t think she felt lonely; lonely wasn’t a vocabulary word that existed in her inner dialogue. But then she began to wonder if maybe she ignored it (the feeling, the word) because it scared her. She couldn’t help but think that maybe she was just playing a semantics game, calling the feeling by other names. Rationalizing and explaining it away. Maybe she was lonely. She just couldn’t be sure because it wasn’t a word she knew how to use to talk about herself.

She wondered how she was ever going muster the boldness needed to be completely intimate with another person. Intimacy was something that she believed required submission to total vulnerability. She had never been very good at submitting, at least not when it counted the most. She liked sex and thought about it all the time, but for some reason in her mind sex and intimacy had never been the same, or even shared the same category of brain space.