A Sign Hangs From My Hunger, by Amabilis O'Hara

Family is a game of genetic roulette and mine taught me that Love is a threat

my synaptic pruning evolution occurred bathed by corrosive acid oceans of shame that wept over me from an intergenerational trauma drain \ so mine is a primordial brain trained to be only at ease when scuttling through inhospitable places / I’m an extremophile species \ a burgeoned Kafka cockroach conceived in adverse conditions / skittering from peripheral sight when your mouth breathes out the Hello! greeting click of a warm incandescent light \

I spent my nymph-hood hopscotching through the liminal, isolated spaces of dissociation / survival instincts honed by the count-down sound of heavy footsteps \ my brutal, brilliant-cut chitin resilience is heavy and isolating armor to bear, but it means I’ve lived when I should have died / and I’m lined with iron-shell insides \ so I’m able to stomach the berry-topped fondant faux-fealty my ancestry offered / revealed with each bite \ as bits of fake fruit made of poison plastics /

miniscule kind-word crumb contrails people drop from their pockets as they fly by are the stale cosmic dreams I subsist on \ every insubstantial nibble of nutrition an exquisite agony / I crave cake, care, and comfortable conditions, but even the memory of joy at licking up the crumbled cracker dust minimum survival equivalent of kindness from life’s linoleum shoves the baseline anguish of my affection-starvation into excruciating awareness \ so I flee anyone who menaces me with the overwhelming peril of congenial company /

yes, I am a wild, on-fire fuse dangling-edge-of-danger thing, but sometimes I want—connection—to be drawn out, caught and coddled in a pair of gentle hands

but I’ll be hard to domesticate unless I can re-equilibrate \ if you scoop me up in a net of tender nourishment, trapping me in a comfortable glass-windowed home that beams in bright solar energy, I will burn in the perception of my own reflection / if you give me the fresh coconut fiber fluff of a supportive community substrate too soon, you’ll force the anguished instar stress-shedding of my insecure attachment style \ leaving a molted pink body of vulnerability / lashing out \ verbalizing harsh and hate / to distract from how I’m defenseless \

make me question if maybe I’m worthy too quickly and I will conflagrate in self-castigating emotional immolation

so I would ask / if you mean to keep me \ make your expectations not reasonable, but realistic / may you lead the way to your open cage with a bland trail of oddments \ cast off cores, peels, and trimmings / so I can choose if I want to follow \ a path of not too much goodness to swallow

/ when I am inside, furnish me with a bare layer of support \ thin enough that I can still feel the solid clicking of cool-hard floor \ and litter it with many hidey-hole half-shaded spaces / so I can curl into a safe-sleeping segmented sclerite whorl \

mine would be a domicile on which you’d best hang a sign that reminds / feed this creature compassion, but please, only sprinkle your loving-kindness, and increase devotion doses slowly \ so I can molt layers of trauma on my own time, when the conditions are right / picking what pieces of your offerings to devour and which to hold, savor, bury, or mold into something my hypervigilant somato-gastronomic sensibilities can withstand \ as I turn them in my softening once-hooked hands / hoarding a mountain of scraps that may, someday, transmute to trust \ and ease the ever gnawing hunger.

Author’s note

This work is about how kindness hurts me. The narrator’s perspective isn’t healthy, but I believe there is hope for them, with loving-kindness from themself and others, to someday view themself as fully human, no longer requiring deprivation or sense of less-than in relationships to feel comfortable or accept goodness.

Amabilis O’Hara

Amabilis O’Hara writes speculative fiction & poetry inspired by emotional connection. Find em at https://www.amabilisohara.com or @AmabilisOHara on social media.