#tw: hunger

[alittlebitofdebris]

Poverty isn't always what people imagine, and I'm facing that really hard lately.

I grew up in poverty. I boiled water for baths when the gas was almost always out.

I lit bonfires in my living room to keep warm and cook finger foods.

I went weekends without eating until I could get to school on Monday for breakfast.

My house was littered with things we didn't use or need because my mom was afraid we might one day need them and not be able afford it.

Our animals often went without food.

I'd walk an hour to the library in any weather to charge a cellphone my friend had given me.

Now, I have a nice home. My pets are well fed and spoiled as much as they can be. I have a smart phone, a computer, a TV. I have pretty things that bring me moments of joy.

I have beautiful things, neatly organized all over my home.

But still, I find myself in financial stress and all the illusions come crashing down.

My friend passively mentions a phrase I barely remember the context of, "you're kinda still living in poverty". I know this was meant for validation of my struggles. I know there was no ill intent.

But now, I find those words echoing in my mind any time I try to spend $5 on something to bring me momentary joy.

I feel the weight of guilt knowing that being mentally disabled has forced this experience on my spouse. I feel like a burden to my friends for not contributing more or needing them to spot me for lunch.

Today was the second time I woke up from dissociating on the floor of the kitchen crying. Likely, I was triggered by having no safe foods.

I hate saying I have no food, I've had no food before.

I have mayonnaise and nearly expired deli meat. I have a can of beans, some ramen and some soup that I hate that got mixed into an old grocery pick up order that I was scared to throw away or donate just in case. There are two frost bitten corn dogs left in the freezer. I have running city water to drink.

But still, I'm sobbing on the floor of my kitchen because even if I wasn't autistic, even if I could stomach a food that isn't my safe food right now, I'm still so scared.

What if I eat the last bite of food I have for a while and forget to cherish it? What if I waste it by throwing up because I'm so anxious? What if my husband needs it to have the energy to get to work?

I have 4 followers here, but the thousands of followers I have on other platforms don't seem to notice or care that I keep spiraling about this. They think the free wigs I get sent, the medicine I take, the makeup and clothes I wear...

It all makes it seem like I'm okay. I'm doing just fine. Really. The looming debt we acquired, the bad credit scores, to get to a mildly safe point in life... It all doesn't seem to occur to them.

But the truth is I'm not. I'm not okay. I'm fighting the urge to beg for donations because I don't know what other choices I have. But I hate needing help. I hate it so badly it causes me physical pain.

[schrijverr]

The Thing That Remains

After his father sacrifices himself so that Oliver can live, he still has to drift for a few days, before making it to Lian Yu. Having nothing but his father’s corpse as company is the first trail Oliver goes through.

This is inspired by this post by @the-feral-gremlin bc that shit gave my brainrot

On AO3.

Ships: none (the life raft lmao)

Warnings: descriptions of a rotting corpse and contemplations of cannibalism and the general trauma of the life raft part.

~~~

Oliver is dying, he must be. There is no way he’s surviving, no matter how his father begged him to try, before he shot himself. Because his mouth his dry, lips cracked, muscles weak and his stomach tearing itself apart, but none of these are the worst part, the worst part is the smell.

When it had just happened, he thought nothing could compare to the horrid feeling of blood on his skin, alongside the brains and skull bits that littered the boat. Copper will never be the same again and he lost what little was still left in his stomach over the edge of the life raft.

However, after drifting for a day and a half with no other company than his father’s corpse, Oliver has found that the smell of decomposition is worse, so much worse.

He avoids looking over when he can, not wanting to come near it or remember it. He can still see it happen when he closes his eyes and he doesn’t want to imprint his father’s dead face in his memory more than he already has to.

So the sea has been his ambient companion, letting him gaze out over it to avoid looking at his father, the smell of salt trying to cover the smell of death, and the waves gently rocking him into a fitful sleep.

But he can’t look away forever. His father wants him to survive, to make it, to right his wrongs, whatever that might mean. As much as he wants to huddle in the boat and slowly fade away, the idea of his father killing himself and Oliver letting it go to waste is too much.

After giving himself a little over a day to stick his head in the sand and ignore all of that happened, the smell is what motivates him to think about doing something.

His father still looks normal. Were it not for the smell starting to set in and the hole on the side of his face. Okay, so not entirely normal, but normal enough. It almost doesn’t feel real that he’s truly gone.

Yet, there is a hole in the side of his face and the smell is assaulting his nose. It’s real. His father is gone.

There’s a tarp-like thing in the supplies that Oliver doesn’t know the function off, which he uses to wrap the upper part of his father’s body. It’s better to have it covered, the legs are easier to ignore than the face. If he’s going to survive like his father wants him to, then he needs to be able to think and he can’t do that with those dead eyes on him.

The body is cold and rigid, but the skin feels loose under his hands. He gags and nearly throws up again. He’s pretty sure the only reason he doesn’t, is because his body kicks into survival mode and realizes it can’t afford to loose whatever little nutrients he still has left.

Once he is done, he retreats to the other side of the life raft again, busying his hands with studying what was actually in the survival kit.

The water ration is pracitcally gone, as are the food rations. There’s a knife and some flairs as well as first aid and a thermal blanket.

He should’ve looked for the blanket earlier, he thinks as he grabs it and wraps himself up in it, the wind not feeling as harsh with it there. Otherwise, nothing in there as useful besides the food. The only injuries aboard are those of his father and he is beyond saving, Oliver is just bruised. There are no boats nearby to see a flair and nothing to cut…

A horrid thought suddenly comes over him at that. Bile threatens to come up again as he stares at the knife.

There is something to cut.

If it were suicide he’d be contemplating, he’d be relieved, but instead his eyes drift a little, landing on his father’s foot. He’s not out of food yet and even if he is, he can last a little without it, but not forever. Would he ever get desperate enough, he wonders?

Oliver’s horrified enough with the idea that he thinks he’ll never be able too. With how he’s lived his life, he’s never seen spoiled food before, everything always fresh and top of the line, kitchens fully stocked. The thought of having to even contemplate eating anything over the expiration date preposterous.

However, he is hungry, has been ever since they went down. The rations are disgusting, but better than nothing. Still, they have to be spread out if he wants to get anywhere.

He’s been drifting for a while now and he hasn’t seen a single boat or a smidgen of land. If this trend continues, it can be weeks before he gets rescued or officially stranded; there isn’t enough food to last him.

But the thought of eating his father is too much for him.

Besides, the body is already starting to smell and while Oliver isn’t a wonder in the kitchen, he’s been there enough to know that meat isn’t left out.

God, it’s so fucked up that he just mentally conceptualized his father’s corpse as meat. Who does that? What kind of fucked up person considers that? He’s been out on the life raft for a mere few days and he’s already thinking about cannibalism.

As if trying to escape his own thoughts, he turns away again, looking out to the sea. The sea, which has become both his comfort and his fear. Looking over the vast expanse calms him and gives him a reprieve from thinking about everything on the life raft itself, however, it’s also terrifying, holding him prison with it’s empty vastness, no hope in sight.

Oliver keeps watching the sea for a good long while, heart beating with anxiety as nothing arises, yet determined to spot a boat or land, anything that will get him off the raft, before he has to consider eating his father again.

The next day, no sign of hope has appeared on the horizon yet. The exposed ankle of his father’s corpse has blisters now and a sheen of fluid where the blisters appeared to have popped also covers it. The smell has gotten worse now too.

Any thoughts of ever eating it, leave his mind immediately. It’s kind of strange how relieved the disgust makes him, that assurance he wouldn’t.

It’s almost like a mirage, or a sign, when land appears in the distance in the afternoon. As if he had to prove to God that he isn’t a terrible person, who would eat their father, before being absolved in the form of safety.

No matter how weak his muscles feel, he puts in his all to get himself to that island, crying what little fluid he has left in his system in relief as he drags the life raft on land and stumbles a few paces before passing out in exhaustion.

When he wakes up again, he eats the last of the rations and makes a little shelter out of his blanket on the beach.

Once that is done, he sits there with an empty feeling in his body. All while he was drifting at sea, he thought that if he could just make it to somewhere other than that life raft, everything would start looking up again, but he’s here on some strange island that appears to have no sign of life and he has no clue how to continue from here.

Instead of wasting away at sea, he’s wasting away on some island. He’s tired, still thirsty and getting hungry again. He just wants to be home, he just wants to cry, he wants to curl into a ball and rest his head on his mother’s lap as he has always done when life gets too much. He doesn’t wanna be here anymore.

The sound of gulls snap him out of his pity party. A part of him thinks food, then the rest of him registers what the gulls think is food: his father.

Anger overcomes him. He has spend days with his father’s corpse on that life raft, he has battled internally until he finally came out on top, knowing his father wouldn’t be desecrated after what he had sacrificed for Oliver. Now here a bunch of gulls are, undoing all his anguish.

Yelling as loud as he can with his dry vocal cords and running with as much energy as he can muster, he hurries to his father, still in the life raft, to chase away the gulls.

It hits him how ironic it is that his dead father remains in the life raft, but it’s not funny. It fills him with rage and with righteousness. His father deserves better than this. He might have told Oliver that he’s not the man he thinks he is, but that doesn’t erase the man Oliver knew. No matter how bad his father thinks he is, he still deserves a resting place.

Rocks are scattered along the beach and there is a solid slab of stone that would prevent the sand from washing out under it and destroying the grave.

Oliver wishes he could dig a proper one, but he has nothing but his hands and too little energy. It still feels disrespectful, as if he doesn’t think his father is worth the energy. He is. Oliver wants to do so much, but there’s nothing left in him. He feels like a husk of his former self, as if he’s still adrift in that raft, no hope in sight.

So rocks it is.

He carries his father’s corpse to the spot he has chosen. The smell is even worse than it had been before and he feels bloated organs move against his shoulder when he throws his father over it, the insides deflating as mysterious fluids cover more of him. At this point, he’s too exhausted to even feel disgusted by it.

On his father’s body, he finds a notebook. It’s almost pristine, an odd contrast with the decomposition of its host. Though Oliver’s fluid covered hands leave fingerprints on its pages, tarnishing it.

It’s the first trail the book will go through, but not the last. The smell of death, of his father’s death, will never leave it. Some day Oliver will find it strangely poetic, but now he isn’t in a mindset to think about anything but his task, stuffing the book in his own pocket as he continues.

As if in a haze, he collects rocks to cover what was once his father, trying to ignore how the weight of some is enough to sink into it where the meat is rotting.

Once he has covered his father entirely, he goes back to the life raft. Before he continues, he washes his hands and body in the sea the best he can, ridding himself of the fluids on him. He can’t replace the clothes he’s wearing and the smell of death still clings to his skin. Yet is feels cathartic in a way, as if he is cleansing himself of the corpse’s presence, having laid his father to rest.

When he is done, he gets the knife from the raft, finding a good bit of wood to carve Robert Queen in. Seeing the name is strange. The thing he has shared his last few days with isn’t his father, though it used to be, yet assigning it the name he has always known his father by seems wrong. There is nothing left of him in that rotted agglomeration of meat and bones.

Still, he must complete this, must see it through entirely. He’s sure he is likely dying still. Reaching land might have increased his chances, but he doesn’t dare keep his hope up. Wherever he has stranded, it doesn’t look good.

Almost as if to confirm his lack of chance at survival, a pain pierces his shoulder and he looks down with wide eyes to look at the arrow that has planted itself in him. The second it all registers, he passes out, the pain and exhaustion finally becoming too much for him.

Waking up somewhere strange without the company of direct sunlight has him off balance. However, the pain in his shoulder and the smell of smoke in his nose, makes him feel more real than anything has these past few days.

Despite it all, Oliver Queen is alive.

~~

A/N:

That whole thing in the life raft is so fucked up, honestly and I can’t believe it’s not the one defining thing he goes through, hell, not even the worst, like how has he some semblance of sanity left?

[darcylightninglewis]

I’m so tired of being hungry.

Tired of worrying how long the sense of fullness will last before I’m hungry again.

I’m tired of not having enough protein in my diet and waking up ravenous at 3AM.

I’m tired of feeling like a charity case and pretending like this is normal, like it’s okay. Like I’m okay having one piece of fruit and no veg a day. Like in addition to being poor I have to be aware of how it looks to be poor.

I’m tired and I’m hungry and it’s fucking bullshit.

[saturni-idae]

Down in the dungeon, where hunger resides 🩸

I wanted to make a dungeon meshi fanart for a while, and man, I love Falin, so here we go

I hope you like it :)

[moonrisemoonchild]

I could go for a full buffet right now. This pregnancy hunger is insane.

[swagvo1d]

a terrifying presence has entered the room

[noisystudentheart]

your body counts every calorie even if you don't.

[foxdoodles]

“you believe me like a god / i’ll destroy you like i am”

— i’m your man, Mitski

[one-time-i-dreamt]

I was in the Hunger Games and the only other person alive was Lin-Manuel Miranda, and he was freestyle rapping everything he said. He killed me with a spear while singing something from Hamilton.

[b0lyachka]

Kiss..

[oldstumppppp]

Cenkipede

[beautiful-basque-country]

Whenever I hear fatxas saying that in Franco's time everybody had good food on their table my blood boils.

Being around 7, granny had to survive solely on turnips for a whole year. She hated them with her soul.

The other gran used to recieve an orange as a Xmas gift.

Granpa had a relative who would go house by house offering a tiny ham bone so the housewife could give her pot of water some flavor. He charged by the time the bone was inside the water, then took it and went onto the next client.

There was rationing.

People would eat leather belts and shoes.

Who exactly had food on their table?

[lxvenderhxzehv]

"I just found the things in books, things that happened in the past were and escape. And even though they were real...they made me feel less alone" Fox put his hands in his pockets "History is full of shitty people...but you know what was good? the things they left behind. The art, the physical stuff that outlives us...its what kept me going" he thought of a way to explain it. "I'm like Indiana Jones with out the professor part." Though he could teach history if he wanted to. it was a good back up option if he needed to use it.

Fox looked at Emrys "Why do you think I left....if I didn't look after our dad and snuck out to do what I wanted to do I'd never hear the end of it. Or how I had to miss out on eating because there was never enough food in the fridge but there sure was enough booze..." He wasn't trying to one up Emrys not by any means. The Name he had the nerve to call emery struck Fox deep. So It wasn't just a him thing. His brother was doing it to his own kid too? "You don't ever have to worry about that Jackass saying that to you anymore. Its over and I don't plan on being anything like he was..." he never was like his brother. "I was 13 when things got the worst they ever had and it took me 5 years to get out of the this shit hole....just wished I had stuck around and then you wouldn't have been out through it too" He sighed the glut washing over him "It seems I left and you just....filled the space"

"Wish it would take this fucking camper with it...." Fox said bluntly kicking a rock in its direction. "Never, I made that promise long ago...we might share blood but he's not my brother....Wasn't my brother" Fox shrugged "I'm here now, whatever you need"

"What does that mean, you buried yourself in history?" Emrys asked, wrinkling his nose and making a weird face as he looked the other over. He did look a little bit nerdy, maybe he was a history teacher or some shit. Emrys could see that. But he didn't have a great rapport with any of the history teachers he'd come into contact with in the past, so he was sort of hoping that wasn't the case. Teachers in general really weren't Emrys' cup of tea, just like he hadn't been theirs.

"You dealt with it, too? So you had a lot of experience fishin' my dad outta his own vomit so he wouldn't choke on it, only for him to wake you up with screamin' and his fists a couple hours later? Or did he lock you in the bathroom at night when the lights weren't workin', too? Call you a fuckin' fag, and then teach you exactly what happens to fuckin' fags who step outta line? Somehow I feel like you and I aren't that much alike," he snorted, shaking his head.

Emrys shrugged. "She died. Or disappeared. People go missin' sometimes, kinda hard not to when the ground can literally open up and fuckin' swallow you whole," he pointed out. "I wouldn't say anythin' really works here, you just kinda learn to put up with it all. But I can help you out if you need, I guess. Long as you're not like my dad. You don't seem like you are, but you kinda look like him, and he didn't always look like a piece of shit, so."

[zanephillips]

TOM BLYTH at the premiere of "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes" in LA

[vesper100]

nosramus and enki discuss the homunculus

[feral-ballad]

Jihyun Yun, from Some Are Always Hungry; “Savaging”

[Text ID: “I woke up having / forgotten even your faces, / but remembered / my hunger. What if this is all / I am left with: / memories of my young body / rifling through refuse”]