To Eat You is to Keep You

I think love, at its most honest, is a kind of hunger, and I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean it in the way it settles into my body, the way it lingers in my mouth, and in the way it sharpens itself against absence and waits to be fed. Only by you. 

They say love is consuming all the time, like it is a safe exaggeration and belongs in poems that never quite touch the body, but I have never understood how to keep it that distant and how to stop the word from thickening into something physical that sits on my tongue and refuses to dissolve.

With you, it always returns to the mouth.

You feed me more often than I admit to anyone else. It has become one of those small, ordinary intimacies that could pass as care from the outside, something almost domestic and gentle, the kind of thing people don’t look at too closely because it fits into what love is supposed to look like. You notice when I haven’t eaten, when I’ve pushed food around my plate too long, when I start negotiating with hunger like it is something I can outwait. You don’t argue with me about it, you don’t make it a confrontation, you just hold something out and say my name in a way that makes refusal feel heavier than compliance.

“2 more bites” you say, and I let you.

Small portions, always, as if appetite needs to be managed carefully, as if it is something that could spill over if given too much space. I have learned to take up less room in this way, to shrink desire into something acceptable, something that can be held between fingers and offered without drawing attention to itself. Hunger is easier to justify when it looks controlled and when it can be broken into pieces and fed slowly and safely.

But there is something about the way you do it that unsettles me, even as I lean into it, even as I open my mouth without thinking, even as I let you decide how much is enough.

Your fingers pause just slightly before I take the bite, like you are waiting for something, and I realise I am watching your hands more than the food, watching the way they move, the way they hover, the way they come close to my mouth and then closer still. The moment stretches in a way that feels disproportionate to what it is, to what it should be. 

People say feeding is care, and I believe that, I do. I know there is softness in it, a kind of attentiveness that makes space for the other person to exist without having to ask for it. There is also something else folded into it, something quieter and harder to name, something that feels like control disguised as tenderness, or maybe tenderness that doesn’t quite know where to stop.

I let you feed me, and in doing so I give you a kind of access that feels larger than it should, something that sits somewhere between trust and surrender, and I don’t always know which one it is.

Sometimes I think about a kitchen we have never shared, a space that does not exist except in the way I return to it again and again, rearranging it each time, placing us inside it as if repetition might make it real. It is always warm there, the windows slightly fogged, the air thick with something cooking slowly. You are standing at the counter, cutting something with more focus than the task demands, and I am close enough to feel the movement of your body without touching you, close enough to imagine what it would be like to reach out and steady your hand, to press my palm over yours and guide the knife just slightly, just enough to justify the contact.

I think about what it would mean to taste something you have made, to let it sit on my tongue long enough to convince myself that I can separate the flavour from you, that I can understand where one ends and the other begins, and every time I reach that point in the imagining, it slips, it refuses clarity, it folds back into you.

Your hands would taste like whatever you touched last, I think, like onion or salt, something that lingers under the nails no matter how much you wash them. I don’t know if what I want is the food or the trace of you inside it. This is the part I don’t say out loud, the way desire attaches itself to things that can be explained and the way it disguises itself as something ordinary and waits to be mistaken for it.

When I kiss you, I don’t have to pretend that softness is the only language available to us. There is a moment, always, where it shifts, where our lips give way to something sharper that presses and lingers and then presses again, and I wait for you to pull back, to tell me it is too much, to draw a boundary that I can step away from and pretend I never crossed. You don’t.

You meet me there instead, match the pressure, let your teeth catch slightly, not enough to hurt, not enough to leave anything visible, but enough that I feel it afterwards, enough that it stays in my body as something more than just a kiss. It feels, in those moments, like we have stumbled into a language that neither of us was taught, something instinctive and slightly wrong and completely ours, and I find myself wondering if this is what it means to be understood without having to explain the terms first.

Maybe this is what we do with love when we are not being watched, when we are not performing it in ways that can be recognised and approved. Maybe we make it strange, make it excessive, let it move toward the edge of something that would look like too much from the outside.

I have started to think that appetite, in bodies like ours, is always treated as something to be contained, something that must be softened before it can be made acceptable, and I don’t think this instinct comes from nowhere. As queer people in a country that teaches us, in ways both subtle and brutal, that our desires are excessive, inappropriate, better left unspoken, we learn early how to make ourselves smaller, quieter, easier to ignore. We learn how to swallow what we want before it can take shape, how to rename it, how to laugh it off, how to fold it into something that won’t draw attention. I have spent so long practicing that discipline, how to take less, want less, need less, how to make hunger look like something manageable, something that will not disrupt the order of things, something that can pass unnoticed even as it grows.

With you, it refuses to stay that way.

It grows, not suddenly, not dramatically, but steadily, insistently, until I can feel it in places I don’t know how to name, until it begins to press against the idea that there is a boundary between where I end and where you begin. I try to understand that boundary, to trace it carefully, to respect it in the ways I have been taught to respect distance, but every time I think I have located it, it shifts again, becomes less certain, less stable.

I want to know what part of you is mine, and what part refuses me, and I don’t mean that in the language of ownership. I mean it in the way hunger asks questions that don’t have clean answers, in the way it keeps returning even after it has been fed.

When you are not here, food loses something I didn’t realise you had given it. It becomes flatter, less precise, like it is missing a dimension I can’t recreate on my own. I eat because I have to, because the body insists, but nothing settles, nothing feels like it reaches the place it is supposed to reach.

Hunger, without you, feels like absence that has learned how to take shape.

I start to think about it differently then, not as something that can be managed or redirected, but as something that might, if followed all the way through, arrive somewhere I am not supposed to go. I don’t picture it violently, I don’t imagine harm in the way it is usually imagined. I think about it quietly, about what it would mean to close the distance completely, to keep something of you in a way that cannot be undone, to hold it inside me where leaving is no longer an option.

I memorized the way you tasted before I understood why that mattered.

There are moments where I come close to saying it, where the thought rises up and presses against my teeth, where it feels like it might take shape if I let it, if I give it just a little more space than it is supposed to have. You look at me then, open, expectant, ready to receive something soft, something that can sit easily between us. I choose silence, or I choose something smaller, something that will not alter the way you look at me.

But the thought remains, patient, learning how to exist without me speaking it.

Later, when you feed me again, when I open my mouth and let you decide how much is enough, I am aware of everything at once—the care in the gesture, the control folded into it, the trust I place in you, the way my body responds before my mind can intervene, the way hunger and desire begin to feel less like separate things and more like different names for the same movement. I wonder if this is what love does when it is allowed to be honest, when it is not forced into the shapes that make it easy to recognise, when it is left alone with the body and all its excesses.

I don’t want to hurt you.

I just don’t know where you end.

And sometimes, when I am this close to you, when I can still feel the shape of your mouth against mine, I think—

to eat you would be to keep you.

And I am still trying to understand what it means that this feels, to me, like love.