Wanting the Good Stuff

The_Hungry_Ghosts-733245

I wanted the good stuff. The good stuff that I had never had – the good stuff that was so painfully missing from my life, the good stuff that had somehow always eluded me. The good stuff that I had never had a chance to enjoy – not even momentarily. Not even once. I’d never even got close to having it.

 

I yearned for that good stuff. I yearned for it and hungered for it so badly that it hurt. Man did I yearn for it! My waking hours were tormented by the constant hungering for it, and at night I was haunted by my pain-laden dreams of it. My hungering for the good stuff was a hole in my very being. In fact the hungering was my being – there was nothing else. I was like a Polo mint. There was nothing else very much going on for me at all other than my constant hungering, my constant hankering, my constant yearning.

 

It started to affect my mind. I wasn’t right in myself at all. After I don’t know how many years of this I could feel something in me getting close to snapping. Then one day it did snap. It actually snapped – I remember the moment it happened, like an elastic band breaking. I became delirious, possibly even psychotic for all I knew. I definitely was psychotic. No question about it. I found myself drifting off into waking dreams. These dreams were extraordinarily vivid – more vivid in fact than reality itself was for me. Reality as it used to be wasn’t even a memory at this stage. It no longer existed…

 

In this dream I wasn’t myself at all but some strange sort of ungainly misshapen creature. I wasn’t my usual self at all. I had forgotten what my usual self was like. There wasn’t much to this creature – it seemed to consist mainly of a huge stomach, four rather spindly legs, a long snake-like neck and a rudimentary head that was, when it came down to it, little more than a primitive mouth. A very greedy mouth. A frighteningly ravenous mouth.

 

In this dream I was very very hungry. This hunger was nothing pleasant. It was a vile, brutal hunger – a hunger with no subtlety, no finesse to it at all. Driven by the appalling pain of this awful hunger I roamed far and wide. I roamed and I roamed and I roamed. Man, did I roam. I seemed to have been roaming for an eternity.

 

After I had been roaming fruitlessly for what seemed like several eternities stitched together back-to-back I started to fancy that I could smell food. Richly tantalizing food, not just any old crappy stuff. Something rare, something wonderful. Something exquisite…

 

And then the hallucinations started to appear – I imagined that I could see tables laden down with food. Fully-laden tables, overflowing tables. Tables groaning under the weight of all sorts of food. And what food! The very best possible food, the most extraordinarily magnificent food. An exquisite banquet, an incomparable banquet – a sight to set my ever-open mouth a-drooling. Even to see it was heavenly, and to imagine eating it was more heavenly still.

 

Alas, this was as far as it got because every time I drew close to one of these heavily-laden tables it would promptly disappear, leaving me hanging there. The drool pouring out of my eagerly-gaping mouth in a veritable waterfall.

 

And then I’d be off again, chasing desperately after the next tantalizing mirage, and then the next, and the next, and the next…

 

What a torment! What a hell!

 

Why was I being forced to endure this appalling experience, I wondered? Why was this happening to me? What had I done to deserve such a fate?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *