Idling away an afternoon with your mother in the far past you hole-punch the silence. Oi mummy what’s your death row meal. If you were about to get electric-chaired, you clarify. A brow furrows. A pause long enough to see shadows move across the wall. A throat clears. Well… she says, releasing you from a reverie that has moved through 12 proceeding junctions.
If I was about to get killed, I don’t think I could eat a bloody thing.
No munch til Brooklyn.
Not a bloody thing.
*
A 15 day water fast is an odyssey.
Water fast means strictly H20. You cheat. Bosh electrolytes. A teaspoon of mineral salt in your sodastream. Espressos slammed with abandon. You take down reams of pukka tea, think about soliciting a sponsorship. Apple and cinnamon trumps three ginger. Two magnesium gummies at bedtime for the cortisol. You sleep like a professional insomniac. Stomp zombie-like to the loo, you smash a third, fall back under before the chewing’s done, wake up with a gumful of gummy and a mouth like treacle.
These are your peccadillos.
Only thing to look forward to.
When you were 21 you stayed in bed from January til June. 21 year cycle coming back around. This year was darkstyle. Your world felt so scary, so intimidating, the most focused bit of research you did all year was the positioning of your pillows for sleep ultramarathons, to give you the best cocoon.
Womb return.
Kept hearing this voice, fast.
Will solve everything. You couldn’t do it though. Your willpower was business class to St Lucia, you were locked in the loos in departures. The furthest you got was an early lunch, like all hurdles set too high the self-imposed defeat hit harder than if you’d just gone easier on yourself in the first place.
Christ was no ifs or buts. He gave us the memo for when we fasted. Like a requirement, like picking your kid up from playgroup. Sooner or later, it had to get done. You’d always been intrigued by Jesus in the desert, Satan on his shoulder. Turn that rock into bread homey, if you are who you say you are.
Last year you went full Jarhead.
21 days on the rack. Your mother circled like a vulture, prodding your rib cage brow creased, way you might jab a carcass in a forest with a stick. You’d railed. This is a private contract between me and the Big Man but if you MUST KNOW I’m doing it for spiritual reasons. I don’t have a problem, I mean I have loads but not that one. LET ME BE.
Out of the flesh, into the spirit. Speaking elvish to the Doors of Durin, Moria had opened up. Started going to mass every morning cycling through streets as the plane tree seeds caused havoc in the sprawl. The fear and self-consciousness, evanescing kudos, the certainty you’d become a chump, usurped by something far louder. All-butter croissant discarded. Body of Christ. Amen.
This fasting was a marvellous medicine, you couldn’t believe it. Aches and pains to the dogs, gums like a toothpaste ad, synapses popped, focus like a kestrel, worked all day at the library til closing and you’d never made it to closing. Dates were a no-go, your breath was halitosis central, but this was no time for working magic, the Lord’s magic was working on you.
2026 had gone awol.
Like it was your last resort. Only thing that could snap you out of an UberEats triple star loyalty discount was some hardpound depravation. Took on the advice from the Martian, about simply beginning. At some point everything is gonna go south on you, everything. You can either give up, or you can get to work. It’s that easy.
*
You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. The best place to go was the Luxemboug Gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat, and in the museum all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow hungry.
Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Ignition.
A girl in the garden below sounds the same three syllables over and over, a friend’s name, a lost cat, baah-deeh-DAH, bah-dee-DAH, syllables grow louder, sing-song, echoing through the cobbles. You approach the window, try make it out but you jinx it. You wonder if she is lost in time, if you’re hearing something not of this place.
The seeds of what we will do are in all of us. The first two days are like the Apocalypto assault course. Spears and tomahawks raining down from all angles. You cancel UberEats but it will take a month to shut down your account, Satan clears his throat.
Man abhors a vacuum. Your stomach abhors it more. 72 hours in you are at your wits end, your mind is the table in Hook. Any glimmer of food you start projectile drooling. Hummous on corncakes, touch of spicy Calabrian. Ella’s Kitchen beef stew would get drained.
The fuzz on your tongue becomes unmanageable. You hit up Medicine Chest, inquire about a tongue scraper. The girl calls the manager. They look at you and frown. Stay in your cell, said St Anthony of the desert, your cell will teach you everything.
You watch Triumph of the Heart. Maximilian Kolbe the Franciscan friar who was Sainted, martyring himself to save a fellow prisoner, warns them not to fall foul of the devil’s snares.
Jung thought all addictions were a way to get closer to God. It was a reaching out with arms extended to touch the Divine, just looking in the wrong place. The attempt to shortcut the separation in a bogus way only created more pain.
As the days draw on, the spirit realm that has played you close attention leaves you be. All converts go through Spiritual Warfare. You pray at night to rebuke the spirits. Am I going crazy, you ask your mother once. Nobody has that vivid an imagination darling. He’s mad, a fairweather friend tells a mate. Something of the serpent in him.
Your boos mean nothing to me.
I’ve seen what you people cheer for.
Rick and Morty
Back from the library you stop by the rusted gates of Copenhagen Fields, overgrown by thickets, something out of Edward Scissorhands. The cows pastured here before being led down the hill to Smithfield.
Descendants of descendants of descendants get smash-burgered for the TikTok populace. Peering through the railings imagining the cud chewers, a little bit of drool escapes, you think forward to your bedtime gummy.
The new flats north of the park that went up faster than it took you to change your sodastream twinkle like fireflies in the glow. Mr Motivator appears. You clean out cupboards, take a scrubber to the mould by the sink. Don Ramón gets a tickling from a bamboo toothbrush dipped in 70% isopropyl alcohol, he looks healthy and new like he’s about to crack a mescal and offer you the worm.
Everything is good, a little too good, too delicate, you tickle the handle of your espresso with a lightness you notice. What is the feeling. Containment. Smugness. Or just novelty. It’s been a while. You’ll take it.
Cherophobia is the fear of impending doom, a rejection of happiness. Flat-lining in bed for days your thinking was always what’s the rush. You got time. But this endorphin beatdown, fending it off with a shield Achilles style, your feeling is this can’t all last forever.
You sleep so little.
Wake at half two, foxes screaming, run a bath, read. Sleep an hour before dawn. For ten days now you’ve slept three hours at most. Every morning is like the first day of creation.
Same same, better than yesterday.
Less scratching of the itch, the hungry ghosts less hungry. Less food, but also less YouTube, less impulsivity, less crappy thought processes, less Arsenal bile, less condemnation, less woe, less I want what I want when I want it. Deny yourself, pick up your cross.
The world is so alive. Colours sharp. Air is clear. Dawning possibility. You don’t feel hunger at all. Better friend, brother, son, bit of cheeky banter for everyone.
You remember walking the church yard after she broke up with you feeling so lost it was deafening, now it is the opposite, something so full and held. You give Mary a bowed cross with a heart in it where she can put her thumb if she’s worried.
You cycle the streets to mass every morning through the dawn. Tunes make you squeal with happiness. Peace be with you always freaks you out, get all nervous, turn this way and that to the sparse congregation, overegg your smile, same one that would scare the crap out of the UberEats guy.
Pick up a little cactus from the shop to keep Don Ramón company. You repot it and drop it, goes everywhere. What if it’s the enemy, what if it’s possessed. What if you’re taking this a bit far. What if you get some sleep.
You think back to Great Eastern St and the lorry, and the wind that blew you backwards as the lorry passed at speed, the guy behind who saw the whole thing and held up traffic for two minutes with his hands on the steering wheel and his head buried in them, as you wondered off in a daze.
Lewis sends through a text about willow. You don’t know what to do with it. How it applies in any way to a bearded guy from Nazareth. There are many truths. Thought of double pepperoni two-step through your dome.
The only chow you get is the Eucharist. The sweet lick of wine every morning is a party. Is that blasphemous. Wonder if one was to get licked on it would one get closer to Christ. Praying in your room something fills your every pore. You almost faint getting up from the sofa. Strange bones find their way to the surface of your skin and press against it.
Job doesn’t help.
Two chapters later you’re thinking about olive oil still.
Snatched sleep can’t wait for the morning. All year you dreaded the mornings from your pillowed womb. When life is Eeyore time goes Roadrunner. Now in your presence you soak up every second, sleep is boring you wish morning would hurry the hell up. Sun, let’s keep it moving bro, let’s go.
You swipe jasmine from the big bush coming back from the shops and put it on the island and take whiffs, stick Jai Paul on and pump it loud in honour. Make sure to whisper sweet nothings to Don Ramón, always numero uno, you tell him.
These fasts are miraculous. No longer at the mercy of the hungry ghosts. Tell them where to get off. Demons hate you fasting, say the Orthodoxy. Dilutes their ability to subsume you to their will, makes them impotent.
List of things that are better
1. You feel like the guy in the Crunchy Nut Cornflakes ad who you could set your watch by.
2. You don’t feel the need to get in the braised beef burrito with that nummy dip from Tortilla on the nightly.
3. You text your mother with abandon.
List of things that are worse
1. You can’t sleep.
2. Don’t remember your dreams.
3. Things seem a little too orderly, like your life is going too well, and a big wave in an endless ocean is stirring and gathering swell and will wash all of this to smithereens.
*
Strange double life, this faith stuff. All you really think about. All you want to write about. A girl so different league you can’t see straight, somehow she’s paying you attention and you see her in the spaces in between thoughts, in the queue for the library, in the infinite black that exists when you close your eyes. You wonder if this shit will turn people off reading you.
All your mates couldn’t be more supportive, just angry with you for not committing. If you like her so much, grow some cojones and make your move. Maybe your task is that, slurred a mate under the influence from the atria of his heart, to explain all this shit in a way only you can, so we can relate to it all.
*
Fifteen days.
Did what it said on the tin.
Fast track to the skies.
A marvellous medicine is right. To get one closer, to centred, to the place before you were lead astray, to duty and truth and the Big Man, to cycling the city at dawn screeching out in warbled soprano at the top of your vocal fry, ruining the pigeon’s cypher on the corner. To fridge raiders splayed out on the table, winking at you.
You remember the big day last year. Lunch, day 22, divide the days by seven said the doctor, just liquids. When they liberated the camps survivors who’d made it through died from overeating. Serious business.
Sat there lifting the soup to your lips your mother had cackled with glee. Look at you darling, just like the Carracci painting of the Beaneater!
You scowl.
She runs to get a phone. Parents these days. Can’t take them anywhere.
So that’s the famine.
Where the feast.
The bone broth is set down on the island, two egg yolks of fine provenance, chopped coriander, lightly cracked black pepper, you smash out a spoon solo on the cement.
One year on, same same but different. Further along. Renewed, made new.
I will give you a new heart, and put a new spirit in you.
Ezekiel 36:26
Hold tight fasting crew.
Hold tight JayCee.
Passin thru.
