relic, ruin, reverence

hello.

a letter on hunger, desire, and the blurring of devotion and destruction…

we talk about hunger like it’s a problem to fix. eat something. scroll social media until it numbs. fill the silence with noise and the emptiness with anything that makes you feel full. but not all hungers are meant to be satisfied. some are meant to be carried. tended to like a flame. not fed, but kept. protected. performed. there’s a reason fasting is a sacred act and why saints starve themselves. brides wear white and nuns wrap their bodies in cloth and silence because there is power in restraint, ache, and longing so deep it begins to shimmer with something divine.

and that’s where the line between consumption and consecration begins to blur.

to be consumed is to be taken in. devoured. dissolved inside someone else. a love so complete it destroys you. but to be consecrated is the opposite. it is to be set apart, untouched, and adored from a distance. not ruined, but revered. left intact, but burning just the same.

and some days, i don’t know which one i want.
do i want to be the object on the altar, or the meal on the plate?

sometimes the hunger feels like a wish to be undone. other times, it feels like a plea to be preserved.

do i want to be made sacred or swallowed?

why are those things so close together?

both require offering. each demands visibility. vulnerability. the willingness to be read, misread, turned into meaning. and what is femininity, if not exactly that? a life shaped around being seen, touched, misunderstood, devoured, adored.

sometimes all at once.

this is why so many women are drawn to ritual. skincare routines. altars. meal prep. lipstick applied like armor. journaling in silence. cooking for someone who may never return. prayer. perfume. restraint. because ritual turns longing into order. it gives the ache a container, offering something for the hands to hold while the heart waits to be seen.

no one understood this more intimately than saint teresa of ávila.

her ecstasy was not poetic. it was physical. her visions did not lift her out of the body, they dragged her deeper into it. she wrote of an angel plunging a spear into her chest, again and again, until the pain gave way to pleasure so complete it became indistinguishable. it was not a symbol. it was sensation and it was sacred.

what she described was not obedience. it was desire.
not purity, but a longing so immense it transcended the body that held it.
she did not beg to be spared. she begged to be entered.

and in that trembling and rupture, she became something eternal.
something holy.

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this type of desire didn’t vanish when the churches emptied. it didn’t die when women stopped fasting and started swiping right and left on dating apps. it only changed shape. now it hides in clean apartments, in rosaries tucked into nightstands, in text messages we write but never send. it lives in the rituals we invent to feel watched. to feel wanted. to feel chosen, even if only to be devoured.

it lives in the books we read just to feel wrecked and in the way we dress when no one will see us. it’s in the quiet offerings we make to people who never ask for them and in the ache to be ruined by love so completely it leaves evidence.

we say we want love. but often, what we mean is: i want to be remade.

and we see it, again and again, in literature like ferrante, lispector, marguerite duras- women undone not by touch, but by the absence of it. by silence. by longing. by loving someone who hovers just outside reach. they keep returning, not because they are weak, but because they are faithful.

and in that faith, they become something else.

to ache well is an art. not passive, but precise. not pathetic, but practiced. it is a performance and design. a quiet kind of hope.

there is a lingering hope that someone will notice the hunger and not turn away and that the offering will finally be enough.

because love, too, is a kind of liturgy.

it lives in repetition. it asks for surrender. it demands presence. you kneel. you wait. you ask. you open your mouth for something you hope will fill you. sometimes it’s god. sometimes it’s a person you made into one.

to be kissed with reverence is no different than being blessed.

to be touched slowly is its own kind of scripture.

to be ruined tenderly is an act of faith.

i think about how many of us are already living like relics. not saints, not yet, but women who have been cracked open and carefully preserved. we brush our hair a certain way. we choose our perfume like a prayer. we speak in a private language made of beauty and restraint. we archive ourselves without thinking. journals tucked away. texts screenshotted and saved. old shirts folded but never worn. glances remembered like sacraments.

we are preparing to be missed.

and beneath all of it is the same hunger, please let this mean something.

so we practice that meaning in private. we build altars out of nothing. we sit in bathtubs like saints in shrines. we anoint ourselves in lotion and silence and poems no one reads. we pretend not to care while hoping someone notices. and still, we return to the same longing. because the repetition becomes the sacred thing. not the outcome, but the act itself.

this is the devotion girlhood teaches. not obedience, but longing. elaborate imaginary romances. unsent letters. mixtapes. the fake weddings. the pages of journals we wrote in the dark. it wasn’t delusion. it was preparation. a rehearsal for offering yourself without being asked.

and eventually, we learn the truth. that it was never about the person. it was about the feeling and the version of ourselves we became in that wanting. we needed to feel holy in our devotion.

so we protect it. polish it. and turn it into art.

and the body becomes a reliquary. not for use, but for reverence. a vessel that holds memory, gesture, meaning. not a body made for function, but for echo. skin becomes sacred because of what it carries. what it remembers. what it hopes for.

maybe it is the wanting that makes it holy.

to ache with intention. to wait without demand. to love without transaction.

to be consumed.

or consecrated.

or both.

i don’t want to be chosen by accident.
i want to be chosen with reverence.
like i am a ritual someone never forgets.
like my body is a scripture they’ve spent their life studying.
like loving me is a sacred act they’ve spent their whole life preparing for.
i don’t want a love that simply arrives.
i want a love that kneels. that trembles. that devours or preserves, ruins or redeems.
something so complete it feels like devotion.
something that says: i saw your hunger, and i stayed.

craving a literary companion? let me recommend a few…

books that feel like the desire to be consumed

(aesthetically gothic, emotionally feral, psychologically sacred)

delta of venus by anaïs nin
the original high priestess of erotic devotion. bodies, dreams, submission, power, hunger. written with so much tenderness it feels like scripture. every story is a confession. every sentence, a psalm for the ruined and radiant. no one writes longing like her. she makes desire feel sacred.

the passion by jeanette winterson
obsession, war, and a woman who walks on water. love so consuming it turns into religion. every sentence aches. winterson doesn’t write stories—she writes spells.

the bloody chamber by angela carter
the blueprint. dark retellings of fairy tales soaked in blood, lace, and submission. women trapped in houses. women breaking curses. women ruining themselves on purpose.

the piano teacher by elfriede jelinek
an icy, brutal masterpiece. repression, masochism, motherhood, and music. nothing is tender, but everything is vulnerable. a cold kind of naked. like being flayed by silence.

a breath of life by clarice lispector
god, death, language, the feminine soul unraveling at the edge of meaning. fractured, lyrical, metaphysical. lispector writes as if she’s possessed. and maybe she was.

her body and other parties by carmen maria machado
sex, obsession, body horror, spectral girlhood. women falling apart in beautiful, terrifying ways. “the husband stitch” will wreck you—it’s about performance, silence, and what happens when the body is treated like myth.

revenge by yoko ogawa
japanese surreal horror at its finest. interlinked short stories about death, decay, and quiet vengeance. always feminine, always eerie, always haunting.

the doll’s alphabet by camilla grudova
grimy, surreal, victorian-factory-core stories about women’s bodies, sewing machines, organs, rituals. reads like someone locked angela carter and david lynch in a basement.

okay that’s all for today.

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bye.

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