Hungerstone

by Kat Dunn

This is the bargain I have struck: to lose my softness in exchange for survival. Pain takes me into its arms and makes a home in my body.

“Disappointment tells us what we truly wanted. And to want is to be alive.”

It was as though the universe had drawn back a curtain and revealed a truth to me: only in fiction was there logic and sense. Good fortune and bad came in equal measure, the just were saved and the wicked punished. In real life, there was no limit to misfortune. You could fall and fall, and never reach the bottom. I had thought myself owed some happy twist of fate, some future good luck, but I knew now that it was only a dream. I was owed nothing. The ground beneath my feet was fragile and unstable, it could shift and break at any moment, no matter what I did.

It is over. Whatever scaffolding I have constructed to hold my life up cannot disguise that I lie in ruins.

The truth is rancid and unpalatable, a meal I have been unable to digest for the last twenty years.

The fear and hurt I have striven to master is pain over a life already lived. Mastery only muted my pain; it could not heal it. There are wounds I carry with me, and there is no way for me to unmake them.

I cannot master the world and hope to fix everything in its place. This cannot bring fulfillment. All we can hope for in life is to know one’s own desires in order to be able to act on them. To want is to surrender to uncertainty. To step into the unknown. To expose ourselves to all possible outcomes and trust we will not be destroyed by disappointment.

Thinking of the dead who have so shaped me, but did not get to see where it was all going.