It's on the days that I let my blood sugar drop too low, going too long between meals, that I am reminded that my body is on a continuum. That each 24 hours is not separate unto itself -- or each 16 if sleep is the turn of the chapters, the space between each ending and beginning. That my hours are strung together unceasingly, linked and linked, dictating the new piece. The heart never rests.

When my blood sugar drops and I start to sweat and shake, I feel like a little animal, scurrying for food. I'll eat anything in sight and just taking a bite starts to calm my nerves.

Emptiness must eventually be filled.

When I moved to a new city, I coasted through space in silence. The first time a new friend grasped my shoulder as he told me a story, I almost burst into tears. My skin had thirsted for touch, without me knowing it. That first drop of familiar touch was like the start of the heart-skin caloric intake I needed.

The body keeps wanting, and wanting, and wanting.

Nutrition and touch and movement and people.

It is line drawings that allows me to connect the full places to the empty ones: When I draw my internal organs on paper, intersecting and being embraced by the spine, the clavicle, the ribs, the internal growling & rumbling gets a little squeezed, a little quieter, a little more up in my throat, out into my words, and across the air to another being ready to love.