Save me. Help me. I need a savior. I need someone to allow me to lean against them. I am unstable and my legs are frozen solid, never allowing me to move from this one spot.

My mouth chews constantly. It chews and chews and chews. It does not like to stop. It protests if there is nothing inside of it. It can be anything, any morsel, any food that will go down my throat as soon as possible. Why should I stop chewing, why should I feel the need to be satisfied? Satisfaction is seemingly impossible. This mouth does not say many kind things. Horrible globs go in and horrible everything comes out. Shouldn’t the mouth act as a guard against criminals, things that are clearly unwanted? Shouldn’t it be one of my few protections?

I am not good at anything. I have no special skills, no talent. I am not a painter, a drawer, a sportsman. But one thing I am especially horrific at is being hungry. I can eat and eat, I can devour packages of food at a time, but I am still left as starving as a man who has not eaten in days. My rotten heart is starving for something to make it pure. It calls out and waits, it protests against what I try and give it to cure whatever ails it, but it is never satisfied.

The stomach and the heart are very different monsters. The stomach is the worst kind. It expands overnight like a balloon being filled with helium and it is my entire fault. The helium spreads to my once-thin cheeks, my thighs, my arms. Everything has expanded fit to bursting.

The Hunger Artist is a very cold individual. She wishes, she dreams, she works, but she always manages to fail herself. She cannot remember the joyous feeling of success because she has never been successful. It has been day after day, month after month of inevitable failure.

The Hunger Artist is always trying to change, which may be the worst part of the matter. She tries to understand herself but she is incomprehensible. She is like a foreign language that her mind wishes she could manipulate and understand.

The mind and the heart are very delicate structures. They are both so easily broken that it is lucky so many people have survived. Is it possible to die from a broken heart or an unstable mind? It should be. The Hunger Artist believes that she would be better off dead from something practical, like an unstable mind, rather than keep on having to live with it.

The Hunger Artist constantly contemplates her own death. She considers those that would be affected and can think of very few. She wishes that death could be easy and simple, that there was a quick way to end her life. But she knows that this is not the case and that somehow, one way or another, she must keep fighting. If only the fight did not feel so futile.