swallowing something holy and it tastes like nothing

i mistake hunger for something else again

The supermarket is too bright for the hour, bleached with white and artificial rays of blanched sunlight, as if time has been ironed flat under glass. Everything hums - freezers, lights, the quiet insistence of refrigeration. I pick up a peach and feel, with sudden and unreasonable clarity, that it is more alive than I am.

Not alive, exactly. Just certain. It knows what it’s doing. Softening, sweetening, collapsing inward at the precise rate required of it. There’s no hesitation in a peach. No self-surveillance.

I press my thumb into the skin, just slightly. It gives. I feel that in my throat.

A man nearby is choosing between two identical cartons of milk like it might alter the course of his life. I want to tell him it won’t. I want to tell him everything will, but not this. Instead I move on, because I am suddenly aware of my body in a way that feels almost theatrical - like I’ve been placed here for someone to watch, even though no one is.

I think about performance a lot in places like this. The choreography of reaching, selecting, discarding. The way we rehearse normalcy in aisles. Or, the way I do. I pick things up I don’t need just to feel my hands doing something. It’s comforting, the illusion of purpose.

In the chilled section, the steel lungs of the freezers exhale a constant mechanical cold. I catch my reflection in the glass. It’s slightly warped, stretched vertically. I look taller, thinner, less real. More beautiful, probably. I stay there for a moment, watching myself breathe. When I was a child, I used to believe my reflection was another person, in another world. I liked to imagine her fun life, all the things she might do that I didn’t, although I found her thoughtful gaze disturbing. There’s something unsettling about witnessing your own existence from the outside, like catching someone in the act of being you.

I wonder how often I am just a reflection of the last person who looked at me properly.

There’s a girl at the end of the aisle laughing into her phone. The kind of laugh that arrives fully formed, without apology. I feel it land somewhere just below my ribs. I want to ask her what it feels like to be that unedited. I want to ask her if it’s permanent.

Instead I pick up blackberries. They’re out of season, which feels pretty major. I buy them anyway. There’s something about choosing the wrong thing deliberately that steadies me. Like I’m proving I still can.

Plus, they’re my favourite.

At the self-checkout, the machine asks if I’ve brought my own bags in a tone that suggests moral judgment. I hesitate too long before answering, as if this is a question about my character. I hope it isn't, because I forgot my own bags. The woman next to me scans everything with brutal efficiency, no pauses, no second-guessing. I watch her hands. I always watch hands.

I think: she knows something I don’t.

I think: she probably doesn’t.

Outside, the air feels different. Thinner, maybe. Or I’ve changed density. The sky is painted with thin cement, still wet with hesitation, in that particular grey that flattens everything into the same emotional register. I sit on the low wall by the car park and open the blackberries immediately, even though I told myself I wouldn’t.

They taste like nothing. Or almost nothing. Every bite a memory of summer rather than fruit, a suggestion of sweetness that doesn’t quite arrive.

I keep eating them.

There’s a moment - there’s always a moment - where I can feel the gap between expectation and reality as something physical. I briefly remember to feel embarrassed, but only briefly. It sits in my mouth, unresolved. I swallow it anyway.

A car alarm goes off somewhere nearby and no one reacts. I like that. The collective decision to ignore a disruption. It feels like a small act of mercy.

I realise, sitting there with juice-stained fingers, that I’ve been waiting all day for something to happen to me. Not anything specific. Just something that would rearrange the air, make it easier for me to move through.

Nothing has.

And yet - there is this. The cold plastic container in my lap. The faint stickiness on my skin. The quiet, persistent fact of being here, in a body that keeps registering everything whether I want it to or not.

I think: this might be it.

I think: this might always be it.

A breeze moves through the car park, lifting a receipt which flickers its butterfly wings and moves with it a few feet before tumbling down again. I watch it like it’s trying to tell me something. It isn’t. But I stay there a little longer anyway, just in case.

These blackberries taste like shit.