Consuming

Like a breath of fresh air,

it entered my life quietly and stayed.

It stirred my wants awake,

lit rooms in me

I didn’t know were dark.

Things I’d never named as need

began to knock,

again and again,

until they lived in my thoughts.

The want to reach, to have-

like thirst in the middle of the sea:

water everywhere,

not a drop that satisfies.

Blessed with abundance,

yet hollow.

Achieving everything,

yet somehow

consumed by what was missing.

There is a feeling

that turns your stomach into a question,

that makes hunger out of fullness-

you eat to the brim

and still feel

a void chewing from inside.

Joy, too, becomes a chase:

you hold it,

and it slips into purpose.

Happiness arrives with tears,

and even when it fills you,

something keeps asking

for more. 

This is how consuming works perhaps,

not the lack of having,

but the having without lacking.

Everything you dreamed of

in your hands,

and still a restlessness

gnawing at their worth.

Is it meaning I’m starving for?

Or a name

to make the ache feel bearable?

A reason

to stop reaching past the moment

that already came?

How do you know,

what you’re looking for,

when desire keeps changing its face?

What do you call the hunger that survives abundance?

How do you know you’ve found it

when wanting

has learned to live on you?

Pritha Krishna