prologue
Food fuels the body. Love fuels the soul. The soul loves the body—or the body the soul?—and so love knows itself in the shape of hunger: the form, or the absence of it.
This is how the world works. You may fight against it, if you wish. You will lose.
There are several explanations. Religion, occult. Science—psychology, evolution, quantum physics. Faith (which is not the same thing as religion). The unending tendency of a proportion of the human race to be optimists, romantics at heart.
They make for complicated studies, the ones who come in, emergency room doors squeaking, lightheaded and lightfooted. You will see them, the man on the street, the man on the train, the man in your bed. The women. The people. The children. Angry, more often than not. Lacking.
There are the ones amongst Tom’s ranks who care about the why. He does not. It is unnecessary. It would be unnecessary, at least, but sometimes he veers, perhaps unreasonably, toward loathing.
Anger would be a preferable fuel. To brim with rage. Choke on it. Driven, but without starvation, without the need for any other shape, the bloat of desire beneath the skin.
Tom has seen. More often than not. The men in beds, the women in beds. The children in beds. The needles, embedded. The first medicine they receive is nearly always fentanyl, because it's the easiest way to temporarily ease the pain. There’s something to be said there, probably has been far too many times, about love and drugs.
You're thinking it now, aren't you. Who wouldn't?
More often than not, the treatment, the prescription, the diagnosis. Cor languidus: heart sick. Sometimes the added symptoms of Hanahaki. (One woman, lilies bursting from lungs, the death of her cat after the death of her wife.) Whoever named these was a fool, and whoever accepted the names bigger fools. The worst fools, though, are the ones who need to be told what they have.
Tom does not need to be told. He knows. What it looks like, what it won't. He knows it doesn’t always get like this. There is a necessary combination of factors—weakness, if he wants to be cruel—that result in the eventual malady, the succumbing. The collapse. If it were that easy, half his orphanage would have been dead in a night.
The thing about love is that the lack of it won't kill you. It'll only make you wish it had.
As it was, they grew up only halfway to starveling—fights about food were easily explained away, given the appetites of growing children and the aftermath of a world recovering from war—but then again, there’s also something to be said for the placebo effect. Is it easier, to anticipate the absence of love?
Are you thinking about drugs yet, or fools?
(All his life armoured close against any possibility. It works this way, you see: love is reciprocal, and as long as you ward against its seeds, no flowers root in your lungs. You do not learn to love until you learn absence. And for Tom, there is little he cannot live without.)