Normal eating is a strange creature. It does not stay the same from one day to the next. It fluctuates, moves, changes with the environment, perking its ears to the sounds of breezes through trees, mind examining and calculating the possible dangers, the pitfalls, the way to move fluidly through the forest without stumbling and breaking a bone. Its keenest instinct is for survival. It knows that the method to do this is... well, not any one method at all. General guidelines, which can change when the guidelines prove useless or dangerous.

Normal eating, though, is not self-starvation. It is not the wild creature laying down, wrapping its tail around its body, occasionally getting up to lap from a pool of water and otherwise resting, languid, slowly but surely making its way to blending with the earth, no more indistinguishable than the patch of dirt upon which it rests.

Normal eating is also not bulimia. It is not the lion cub, tearing at a bloody carcass savagely, devouring as much of the raw fuel as it can fit inside its belly, and then running, growling, paws pounding hard over rough stones and blistering, scorching savanna for hours and days, frantic and stuffed and never fulfilled all at once.

Normal eating is the hummingbird, its beak poised inside a brightly-colored blossom, intaking the sweet essences contained in the flower's heart. It is a tree, its roots planted firmly in the ground, its branches outstretched, the sunlight warm and caressing on its full green leaves. It is, too, the stray dog begging for every scrap of food a human hand is willing to toss down to it; it is the seagull tearing apart garbage, scavenging for all the crumbs it can find in a greasy paper bag, a plastic toxic concoction of half-eaten oils and starches. But it is also the hawk soaring over water, catching a fish in its talons, soaring even with the heavy weight dragging it down -- finding the shore, finding life -- triumphing in the end as it rejoices in its hard-earned prize.


I want to be the hawk.