The Hungry Ghost [fiction]

(Originally posted August 8, 2013)

The skin of her bare back glows as she fastens her jeans, and for a moment I have the thought that I'm watching a ghost.

I've known this woman for a few years now.

I've learned not to call her. She comes when she wants. Sometimes a couple weeks in a row. Other times months pass. Then a text, five words, always the same: When can I see you?

From what little I know about her, her life looks perfect from the outside and she takes great pains to keep it that way, like a plastic wedding cake behind a pane of glass. Beautiful. Perfect.

Inedible.

Some people want to have their cake and eat it too. Not her.

She has her cake, but cannot eat. She would rather the world admire her perfect, plastic cake while she quietly starves.

I guess that's where I come in.

Her husband is seeing other women. He knows she's seeing other men, and he doesn't care.

She says she doesn't care either.

Now and then, she talks about leaving him. Not now, because Christmas is coming up and he needs to be at the parties. Not yet, because they would have to sell the house and she doesn't want that.

But soon, she says. One day.

And then she'll ask about the broken antique typewriter on my coffee table or  to tell me my walls are too bare. She'll ask me to tell her a story about comedy or what I think of her new bracelet.

I'll answer truthfully and think of perfect, plastic fake couples perched on top of perfect, plastic fake cakes.

She talks about traveling. About wanting to grow strawberries. About all the things she'd love to do but isn't doing because work is too busy. Sixty hours a week she puts into it, she estimates. But things will slow down in a couple months, and she'll have time for herself.

She's been telling me that since the day I met her.

I trace the lines on her face with my fingers.

I keep her secrets and allow her to come and go as she pleases.

 Her life is about containment, staying in the box she made for herself. That's not bad; it's what most women do. What most PEOPLE do.

They find a way to live with being hungry.

I listen. I tell her the Truth. I make her laugh. I do what I do best. After, I hold her until her breathing is slow and deep.

She's smiling when she leaves. She seems calmer, more at peace. She looks years younger. It won't last but she deserves happiness and at least it's something.

Me?

I'm content.

I pad to the bathroom on bare feet enjoying the sensation of my toes flexing against the floor. My chest feels warm and open, my heart still, my lips bruised and tender.

It's only later, much later, lying in bed in the dark that I notice a pinprick of feeling in my stomach, barely noticeable, a will o' the wisp of sensation as half-formed and transparent as a phantom.

It whispers: I'm still hungry.