Colleen is sick with wanting, and her whole body quakes with the force of it, her soul quails as the old bruises resurface. She has been many things of late: compulsive, self-harming, manic, invincible, but never yearning. Even as her traitor hands forced soap and hair and rusty nails down her adamantine gullet, even as she fought to stop until her muscles tore, that was a desire born of surfeit, not of lack.

This is not the old hunger, but she dreams of it, nonetheless.

Dreams of starving, of pacing endlessly through the night, too hungry to sleep, of the white hair that sprouted on her arms and the back of her hands, of staring furiously at pictures of food, of eating out of garbage cans, of stealing food from empty sidewalk tables, of lukewarm, half-eaten food, rotten food, scraping mold off with her fingernails, rancid butter, sour oil, the corpselike bloom of raw pizza dough warmed by the sunbaked steel side of a dumpster, of need.

These days are not those, but her body remembers. Her body, still mortal, does not forget.