“The mind has already forgotten what the body still misses.”

-Regina Spektor

I wonder why I’m always so hungry. I eat, and eat, and eat. I shove my face. I get sick from eating so much. I pat my stomach and think it’ll finally thank me for my hard work. And yet it is always greedy for more.

The parallel between my stomach and myself isn’t lost on me; we’re both constantly wanting more and more, and then when we get it we want more after that. Call it the death drive, a self-fulfilling prophecy, greed. However you describe it, what it implies is a constant need, and a constant inability, to be filled.

In her essay “How To Never Be Enough,” which reads like something Freud would write if Tumblr existed during his time, Melissa Broder explores what it means to be alive and constantly trying to fill the void inside of you after you’re born. She brags about her childhood attempts at achieving enough-ness through consumption, which begins right from birth with her suckling her mother so much that her weight class outranked her height:

I was trying to sate the existential fear of what the fuck is going on here with milk. I was sucking and sucking, but there wasn’t enough milk. There would never be enough milk. One titty is too many and 1000 are never enough. What I really sought was a cosmic titty. I sought a titty so omniscient it could sate all my holes.

 

This desire for self-consumption continued into her infant years o how as a child her  favorite snack was herself:

In an attempt to be enough, I began to consume my own body parts. I ate my fingernails and toenails. I ate every single one. I liked to bite them off and play with them in my mouth, slide the delicious, calcium-rich half moons between my teeth until my gums bled. I tried to enjoy my own earwax, but earwax is an acquired taste. Later in life I became a connoisseur of my own vaginal secretions. The depth of range was astonishing. The vagina is always marinating something.

Her favorite part of herself to ingest, however, were her boogers. Creating a shield with her hand, she’d go to town in her nose like a miner digging for precious gems. “Some of my happiest childhood days were spent behind that handshield. I felt self-contained, satisfied, full on myself. The other kids knew what was up and they made fun of me, but I didn’t care. The bliss was too profound.”

When I was a kid, I ate my boogers too. The way they were both hard and soft, chewy and tender, always fascinated me. I never thought of it as an act of literal self-fulfillment, but maybe Melissa is onto something. Maybe child-me knew better than I do now that I’d never be enough, that I’d always be hungry, that I could stuff my face with myself and still, my stomach would growl like a ravenous bear.

Are any of us ever really full? We eat, we laugh, we say “I’m done.” We clear our tables. We go about our days. We go home. We eat again. And yet, our stomachs groan again. They say, “I’m not satisfied. Feed me. Help me.”

Sometimes, we get lonely. Sometimes we get so lonely, it feels like our stomachs will always be empty, even after we’ve eaten everything in the fridge. Sometimes food isn’t enough to fill us. We try other things, other people, ourselves even. But in the end, we always need more, look for new things to fill us, beg our stomachs to finally be full.

Perhaps we’ll never be full. Perhaps that’s how it has to be.

-Isaiah Rivera