#appetites

“It never really goes away, the longing for the life not lived, because isn’t that part of how we come to know ourselves too? Through what we lack as much as what we have, all we dream but do not hold. Some desires have no resolution.”

On the crest of a hill, the third voice enters: a voice that demonstrates, with elegant precision, the primacy of speech over writing. Johann Drake is trying to swallow a Bible. Take it, and eat it up. Eating a book is a nonliterate response to text. Ingested and digested, the words become part of the speaker, who is then endowed with the spirit of prophecy. The image echoes the sacrament of communion, in which participants ingest the body of Christ, the Word made flesh. The vision of eating a book evokes a transcendent relationship with language, in which one is not a speaker but an instrument. The words of the Book flow from one’s mouth. Pure praise, pure expression, like lark song. As the old hymn puts it, “How can I keep from singing?”

Our thoughts, feelings and whereabouts: Food we dish up on plates called photographs and status updates; to feed Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.; beasts with insatiable appetites.

[…] what if I were to devour them? Bone and brain and bezoar, the last swallowed whole and unbroken. Would their cells, once edited into nutrients, then parasitize mine? Colonize and civilize the crenellations of my brain, develop into a ghost, a disparate consciousness. If I could answer this with any certainty, I’d consume them in a heartbeat, preserve them in every chapter of my body. I’d do anything but watch them die. Even if payment for their longevity isn’t shared tenancy of this body, but complete monopoly. Better I be reduced to miscreant daydreams of the ocean than be alive without them. Whatever it takes. Anything. Anything, so long as they stay with me.

For fun I wanted to see how much crossover there was between readers of my angsty Ascended Astarion romance fic and my angsty Dark Justiciar Shadowheart romance fic and I was shocked to see that there's zero, absolutely no crossover, no one relates to the appeal of both, and I have come to the conclusion that everyone else is just pretending to be a toxic bisexual, I'm the only one.