Fed

He wakes up hungry.

Not the kind that growls right away. Not the sharp ache that sends you straight to the fridge with your eyes half closed. This hunger sits deeper. It waits. It stretches its legs. It lets him brush his teeth, pull on a shirt, step into the morning before it clears its throat and reminds him it’s still there.

He notices it most in the quiet moments. Standing at the bus stop with his hands in his pockets. Washing a mug that still smells faintly of coffee. Watching the steam rise from other people’s breakfasts through restaurant windows. The hunger doesn’t say what it wants. It just presses.

For a long time, he thought it was food.

He grew up counting meals. Not in a dramatic way. No empty cupboards, no dramatic scenes. Just a steady awareness of what cost what. Meat was stretched thin. Seconds were rare. He learned early to eat slowly, to make the plate last. Hunger, then, was practical. It had rules. You could plan around it.

This hunger ignores rules.

He eats anyway. Oatmeal, eggs, toast. He eats more than he needs, sometimes. He eats standing up. He eats late at night. The hunger watches him chew, unimpressed.

On the bus, he scrolls his phone. Photos of people he knows only loosely. Old classmates announcing engagements. Coworkers posting vacation pictures. A man he once shared a desk with has written a short essay that’s getting attention. Hundreds of likes. Comments full of praise. He feels a tightness behind his ribs.

There it is.

He doesn’t want their lives. Not exactly. He doesn’t want the beach house or the ring or even the praise. He wants purpose — whatever that actually looks like at 6:30 on a Tuesday. Waking up already angled toward the day. The ease of people who don’t pause before committing.

He wants to feel chosen. Even if he’s the one doing the choosing.

At work, he does what he’s supposed to do. He’s good at it. That’s part of the problem. The tasks line up neatly. Emails answered. Meetings attended. Problems solved in ways that don’t rock the boat. His manager trusts him. His performance reviews are solid, sometimes glowing.

“You’re reliable,” they say.

The word lands like a weight.

Reliable people are fed, on paper. They have health insurance. They have schedules. They have just enough praise to keep them from asking harder questions.

Around noon, the hunger sharpens. His stomach joins in, eager to be useful. He buys lunch from the place downstairs. A sandwich, a bag of chips. He eats at his desk, clicking through spreadsheets, barely tasting anything.

Across the room, a coworker laughs too loudly at something on her screen. Another complains about a client. Someone heats fish in the microwave and apologizes. Life hums along, content with itself.

He wonders when he started wanting more than this.

As a kid, he wanted simple things. A bike that shifted gears smoothly. A bedroom door that locked. To be the fastest runner in his class. The wanting had edges then. You could see where it began and ended.

Now the hunger feels like fog.

He tries to name it. Purpose, maybe. Meaning. Something he wouldn’t resent losing sleep for. These words feel borrowed. They sound better on posters than in the mouth.

He once told a friend he felt restless.

“You just need a vacation,” she said, and meant well.

He took one. A week off. A cheap flight. He walked streets he’d never seen before, ate food with unfamiliar spices, took photos of buildings and sunsets. For a few days, the hunger softened. It leaned back. It let him breathe.

Then, on the last night, sitting alone in a bar, it came back sharper than before. The realization that he could be anywhere in the world and still feel this way landed hard.

Location wasn’t the problem.

Back home, he tried other solutions. A gym membership. Early mornings. Cutting back on sugar. Reading books about habits, about fulfillment, about finding your why. He underlined sentences. He nodded along. None of it stuck.

The hunger doesn’t respond to advice.

Sometimes, late at night, he opens the folder on his laptop labeled “Ideas.” It’s a mess. Half-started stories. Notes for projects he never began. Lists of things he might do someday. Learn a language. Start a newsletter. Take a class. Volunteer. Write something that matters.

He scrolls through and feels two things at once. Excitement, faint but real. And fear, loud and persuasive.

Because hunger, when it gets specific, asks for payment.

He knows what would quiet it, at least a little. He’d have to risk being bad at something. He’d have to be seen trying. He’d have to accept that he might pour himself into work that goes nowhere, that earns nothing, that fails publicly.

Reliability has kept him safe. Hunger wants him with his name attached.

He closes the folder.

Weeks pass. The hunger adapts. Meaning, if it meant anything beyond getting through the week without resentment. He catches himself dismissing other people’s joy. He becomes quieter in conversations, less present.

At a family dinner, his mother asks if he’s happy.

“Sure,” he says automatically.

She looks at him for a second longer than necessary. She doesn’t push. She never has.

Later, washing dishes together, she says, “You know, it’s okay to want things.”

He almost laughs. The understatement of it. He almost says too much.

Instead, he nods.

One night, he can’t sleep. The hunger has turned insistent. It’s no longer content to wait. It keeps tapping at him, like a finger on glass.

He gets up and opens the laptop.

He doesn’t open the Ideas folder. He opens a blank document.

At first, nothing happens. The cursor blinks, patient and accusing. His chest feels tight. His mind fills with reasons to stop. This is pointless. You’re tired. You’ll delete this tomorrow.

He types anyway.

The sentences are bad. They wander. They repeat themselves. They say nothing new. He keeps going. Twenty minutes. Forty. An hour. His shoulders ache. His eyes sting.

Something shifts.

It’s subtle. Easy to miss. The hunger doesn’t disappear, but it changes posture. It leans in instead of pressing down. It feels less like a threat and more like a current.

When he finally stops, he doesn’t reread what he wrote. He saves the file with a generic name and shuts the laptop before he can talk himself out of it.

He sleeps, deeply, for the first time in weeks.

The next day, the hunger is still there. Of course it is. But it’s quieter. Less desperate. Like it trusts him, just a little, not to ignore it completely.

He writes again that night. And the next. Not always well. Not always for long. Some days, the hunger flares when he skips it, sharp and reproachful. Other days, it sits contentedly while he writes a single paragraph.

He doesn’t tell anyone. This isn’t about praise. Not yet.

Weeks turn into months. The hunger becomes a companion instead of an enemy. It guides him. It corrects him when he drifts back into numb routines. It reminds him when he’s lying to himself.

He starts making choices differently. Small ones. He says no more often. He pays attention to what drains him and what doesn’t. He risks mild disappointment. He lets himself be mediocre in public.

None of this makes his life dramatic. He still works the same job. He still eats lunch at his desk sometimes. He still feels envy and boredom and fear.

But underneath it all, there’s a steadiness he didn’t have before.

He understands now that hunger isn’t a problem to solve.

It doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful. It doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It means there’s a part of you that wants to be used.

He wakes up hungry.

He smiles at it, just a little.

Then he gets to work.