Paromita’s Reviews > The Hunger Angel > Status Update

The camp stretches on and on, bigger and bigger, from my left temple to my right. So when I talk about what’s inside my skull I have to talk about an entire camp. I can’t protect myself by keeping silent and I can’t protect myself by talking. I exaggerate in one case just as I do in the other, but I WAS THERE doesn’t fit in either. And there’s no way of getting it right.

By now I’ve realized that what’s written on my treasures is THERE I STAY. That the camp let me go home only to create the space it needed to grow inside my head. Since I came back, my treasures no longer have a sign that says HERE I AM or one that says I WAS THERE. What’s actually written on my treasures is: THERE I’M STUCK.

Little treasures have a sign that says, Here I am.
Bigger treasures have a sign that says, Do you remember.
But the most precious treasures of all will have a sign saying, I was there.

Now I was someone else. We knew each other in a way we no longer were and never would be again. Being a stranger is hard, but being a stranger when you’re so impossibly close is unbearable

I knew they’d been more frightened than surprised when I came back—there had been relief but no joy. By staying alive I had betrayed their mourning.
Ever since I came back, everything had eyes. And all the things saw that my ownerless homesickness was not going away.

For my five years in the camp I have five things to say:
1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.
Absolute zero is that which cannot be expressed.
The emergency exchange is a visitor from the other side.
Inside the camp, the we-form is singular.
Perimeters run deep.
But all five things have one truth in common: they are fundamental, like the silence that exists between them, and not the silence in front of witnesses.

..People mistook memory for yearning. How can you tell the difference, if the same thing keeps churning in your head over and over and your world is so lost to you that you don’t even miss it.

When you haven’t heard from that other world you know as home for so long, you wonder if you should even want to go back, or what you should wish for once you’re there. In the camp, all wishing was taken away from us. We didn’t have to decide anything, nor did we want to. It’s true, we wanted to go home, but we contented ourselves with looking back, and didn’t dare yearn ahead...

Every day since I came back home, each feeling has a hunger of its own and expects me to reciprocate, but I don’t. I won’t ever let anyone cling to me again. I’ve been taught by hunger and am unreachable out of humility, not pride

The very last happiness is the onedroptoomuchhappiness. That comes when you die.