Hungerstone

To be a woman is a horror I can little comprehend.

It is terrible to be alive. But it is worse to be dead to ourselves.

I do not need to contain my appetites. What is a monster but a creature of agency?

All we can hope for in life is to know one's own desires in order to be able to act on them. To want is to surrender to uncertainty. To step into the unknown. To expose ourselves to all possible outcomes and trust we will not be destroyed by disappointment.

I want; it is a new and thrilling revelation. I can want, and it will not destroy me.

Disappointment tells us what we truly wanted. And to want is to be alive.

A vampire is a creature of total want, of pure appetite, an antithesis to our self-denial, and I find myself picking through the bones of the story about the tension between these two states. Appetite is a dirty word for women, a cardinal sin. For food and sex, yes, but also for power, for ambition, for violence. What is Carmilla but a woman unleashed on any limits on her appetites? Does it make her monstrous? Is what we celebrate in men always monstrous in women? Is it also not monstrous to starve ourselves, to kill our appetite until we embody a living death?

I learned quickly that my wants and needs were unwelcome, too great for any reasonable person to fulfill, and in time I came to agree with her. I was too much, too loud, too emotional, too clumsy, too self-involved. My existence was a burden to all involved with it, and I resolved to never make any demand if I could help it.

I wonder for what you hunger and whether you allow yourself to feel it.

I made a bargain in my youth, for safety, for survival, and it has all been for naught. I am not safe. I have never been safe. So why have I tried so hard to create it? All I have made is a prison. But perhaps if I have never been safe, that means fear has no purpose. I am not safe if I obey and reduce and control, just as I am not safe if I rebel and shout and anger.

I hated her because I did not understand what it was that I had lost before I saw it in her.

I furl myself in the quilt like an oyster in its shell with no pearl to show for the grit that works through it.

Oh, little Lenore. It is terrible to be alive. But it is worse to be dead to ourselves.

If the world offers me no kindness, then I will take from it armor and sword, create an unassailable fortress for myself, and lock the door.

Before, I stood on the banister of the balcony above the dining hall and thought the solution to the burden of myself was to end it all. How foolish that seems now. How futile. I could go, and no one would care. How much better to make them all regret knowing me.

None of us deserve our bad fortune, but that does not stop it from coming.

This is the bargain I have struck. To lose my softness in exchange for survival.

I want, I lack, I hunger.

What is a monster but a creature of agency?

I remember only the sense that the whole world passed before me, and yet I belonged nowhere in it.

How frightening it would be to die, but how great a relief to sleep forever.

I will die like all mortal things. At least let me taste a little life before I go.

The more I understand my own appetite, the more I understand how far I am from satiating it. It is as though it spills out from me from every direction. I want to be desired, I want to travel, to paint, or write, to be listened to and respected, needed. I want true family, whether that be children or not. I want, I want, I want.

She gives such insults generously. As if her opinion is a gift.

I wanted to be near her light. Even though she cast me in its shadow.

I was too much, too loud, too emotional, too clumsy, too self-involved. My existence was a burden to all involved with it, and I resolved to never make any demand if I could help it. Then, perhaps, I could be tolerated. Then, perhaps, I could be loved.

It is too much to look at suffering directly. We can only survive if we close our eyes; reality is not a thing to be experienced raw.

My body is my enemy, and I will use every weapon in my arsenal against it.

Carmilla holds an allure, like ghosting a finger around the edge of a flame: the temptation, the beauty, and the anticipation of pain.

I am not made for this, but Cora is. She skips lightly from stone to stone, vivacious and bright and so unencumbered. Jealousy is not an emotion I have easily tolerated in myself before, but it spills out now, raw and vicious, a blade turned against my own heart. I am jealous of Cora's passion and carelessness, but most of all I am jealous that she can experience all these things at an age when I held myself under such rigid control, when I was a creature made only from fear and survival. I am jealous that anybody has the gift of growing up differently.