The paradox of starving heart
The Paradox of a Starving Heart
Do not stand too close to me
there is nothing holy here,
only a well-dressed ruin
perfumed to resemble living.
I move the way abandoned houses do:
still standing,
still visited by light,
yet filled with air that no one trusts to breathe.
I have always wanted happiness
the way drowning men want shore,
yet every night I return
to thoughts sharp enough to bleed on.
Perhaps grief and I
have learned each other too well.
I tell people I do not care.
That is easier.
The heart survives longer
when spoken of like an object.
Yet every silence bruises me.
Every distance enters quietly
and rearranges the furniture inside my chest.
There are evenings
when coffee cools untouched beside me,
steam loosening slowly into nothing,
and I think:
this is how souls disappear
not loudly,
but in small evaporations
no one notices until the room grows cold.
My mind does not rest.
It circles itself endlessly,
like a bird mistaking a closed window
for another piece of sky.
And thought
thought is a beautiful disease.
The more deeply one feels the world,
the less inhabitable it becomes.
Even joy arrives carrying shadows.
Even laughter sounds temporary.
I have become fluent in contradiction:
I push people away
while memorizing the warmth of their hands.
I long to be understood
yet bury every honest thing
beneath polished sentences
and practiced calm.
I fear abandonment,
yet vanish first.
I call my loneliness peace
because naming it pain
would make it real.
And love
love arrived like sunlight
entering a room that had survived too long
without windows.
It touched everything gently.
That was the problem.
Gentleness frightened me more than cruelty ever did.
Cruelty is predictable.
Cruelty announces itself.
But kindness
kindness asks the wounded
to believe in things
they have never survived before.
So when someone held me softly,
I searched their hands for leaving.
I waited for tenderness
to sharpen into distance.
Because hunger changes shape
when it is left alone too long.
Eventually, the starving stop dreaming of feasts.
They begin distrusting nourishment itself.
And maybe that is what I became:
someone so accustomed to surviving emptiness
that fullness began to feel fatal.
So now I exist
somewhere between wanting to disappear
and wanting someone
to notice that I already have.
And every morning
I wake again
not from hope,
not from healing,
but from habit.
Like a clock that keeps ticking
inside a burning house,
uncertain whether it is measuring time
or merely waiting
for the ceiling to collapse.