empty bowl waiting
quietly, the air thickens—
hunger learns to sing
I used to think comfort lived at the bottom of a bowl. Steam curling upward like language in a language you used to know. Bread torn by hand. Rice still clinging to the sides of a lacquered bowl. The soft fatigue of a body fed.
But lately, comfort arrives in the space where food used to be. In the pause between wanting and having. In the long, slow hunger that doesn’t demand but inquires.
There is a kind of clarity that arrives on hour sixteen. A sharpening. Edges become more pronounced—not just around your thoughts, but around your intentions. The noise thins. The body, unburdened by digestion, listens better.
You begin to notice things. The scent of water. The curl of your own breath. The pulse in your fingers. Hunger, when held gently, becomes less of a demand and more of a companion. Like a child tugging at your sleeve not to be fed, but to be seen.
A man once told me, over bitter tea in a mountain cabin, that we confuse comfort with dullness. “People seek the absence of friction,” he said. “But what they need is the presence of refinement.”
I think he meant that when you remove the unnecessary—food, noise, even conversation—what’s left is a self that isn’t blurred by indulgence. A self you might not recognize, but should meet at least once.
He fasted once a week. Not for discipline. Not for weight. But because, as he put it, “How can you know the music if you never sit in the silence between songs?”
In the city, everything arrives fast. Coffee. Notification. Instant noodle. No one waits anymore. And yet, waiting makes things real. Waiting is a kind of seasoning. Hunger, too, is a kind of prayer. It says: I am willing to feel this. I am willing to meet the edges of myself without softening them first.
I’ve come to think of fasting as a private weather system. You carry it with you. It rearranges your thoughts. You lose interest in gossip. You stop craving sugar and begin craving stillness.
A few years ago, I spent three days in a borrowed cabin near the coast. No food. No phone. Just a kettle, a notebook, and a small ceramic cup. The first night was noise—stomach noise, mental noise, old echoes of snacks long past.
By morning, something had settled. I brewed tea and watched a spider rebuild its web after a windstorm. It worked methodically, without panic. I sipped slowly. My hands were steady.
I thought: There is a rhythm here I used to belong to.
People ask if it’s hard.
Of course it is. But so is carrying the weight of constant gratification. So is forgetting how to be alone with your own pulse. So is the blur of never pausing long enough to ask, Is this hunger or just habit?
Comfort, I think, isn’t about fullness. It’s about recognition.
When I fast, I meet myself without adornment. No sauces. No distractions. Just this breath. This body. This mind, climbing quietly out of the noise.
Fasting doesn’t make you more virtuous. It just makes you more visible to yourself. It strips away the things that numb the signal. The notification loop. The second helping. The story you tell about why you need the thing you keep reaching for.
And when it’s time to eat again—when that first spoonful of warm broth touches your mouth—it feels like the closing of a circle.
The return. But gentler.
life 