Hunger Lauren K. Watel (bio) Dinner at a restaurant in a hotel in what was once, in the fifteenth century, a fortified village on a small coastal islet, and the young waiter taking your order fixes you in his gaze and announces in a dashing Slavic accent, I am hungry. Hungry for love. At seventeen you’re flattered by his attentions but afraid to engage them, so you laugh him off and manage to escape. But you’re afraid, yes, afraid of the young man’s hunger but also, more than anything, of your own hunger, your own openness. You sense how easily you could be broken, how easily crushed, and you shrink from experience, from desire, there on the islet and back at home, preferring to live inside your fantastical imagination. What, exactly, are you afraid of? Aside from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases—healthy fears, which the girls’ school you attend begins drumming into you in middle school health class, with its terrifying graphic slideshow and an array of contraceptives passed around like so many souvenirs brought back from trips abroad, a whole semester’s worth of warnings, cautionary tales, diagrams, and charts of private bodies, alienatingly scientific; it’s enough to convince any halfway-sensible pre-teen to run for the convent—you’re afraid of boys, their desires and attentions, which seem both natural and inevitable but also vaguely ominous, perhaps because these desires and attentions seem to emanate from someone else inside them who is seeking someone else inside you. And maybe you aren’t ready for the someone else inside you, not ready to face her, to shake hands and admit to knowing her, not ready to acknowledge how closely she resembles you, how she mirrors your habits and attitudes. Because in other respects she doesn’t resemble you at all; she’s rebellious and unruly, willful. Her willfulness frightens you, and as she emerges inside you, it’s like seeing a stranger with your features, as if you’d been born with a twin and separated from her at birth, and you brought up by your proper family and she brought up elsewhere, perhaps by an [End Page 105] improper family, perhaps by a family of feral forest creatures, with all the ways she carries on. She’s trouble, that twin stranger; she displeases you with her unkempt hair and her disorderly arms, how they flap showily, uselessly about her shoulders like a pair of clipped wings. Often you regard her with pity and revulsion, sometimes wanting her to stop flapping, other times wishing she would fly away. But once you’ve been reunited, it seems there’s no separating you. And how tall you’ve become by the time you meet again, your twin and you, your twin even taller than you, and while you stoop and even hang your head as though ashamed of your growth—you keep trying to stoop yourself to the level of most of your peers, the girls so petite, dainty enough to fit in your palm, destined for success in gymnastics and cheerleading, the boys a litter of runts, though the way they shout and poke and snicker makes them seem so much bigger than the girls, as if they were shouting and poking and snickering aspirationally, on the way to higher altitudes— while you stoop and shrink into yourself, your twin stretches like a vine, reaching every which way for the strands of sunlight waiting around the next corner. Every time she walks into a room, she seems to bump her head on the door frame, her legs comically long and skinny, like a child’s drawing of stick-figure legs. She moves with a gangly, nervous energy, as if her legs were carrying out instructions beamed in from a distant planetary being intent on a thorough study of human adolescent awkwardness. But does she care? No, she keeps striding on those legs, your gangly twin. To keep up with her you have to sprint, even though you long to walk and let her keep running, around the next corner, let her vanish into the lights waiting there. But there’s no letting her go...
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Aug 1, 2024
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