A Hunger I Will Never Sate Again

A downloadable PDF version with period-inspired formatting can be found on itch.io.

It all started with a Book.

Its name and Author are lost from my thoughts but I cannot seem to shake its contents nor the things it led me to experience. I wish I knew how I got it. I picked it at random from amongst the ones unread within my personal library.

Its russet color stood out from everything else, not for its shade but its texture. When I gripped The Book, I could not help but run my hands over its cover. You would have expected a smoothness but there was a subtle texture to it that I have only experienced one other place. Before I even got to reading it, I just passed it between my hands for days learning every intricacy of its surface.

I eventually drew myself past the cover and found the contents within just as enrapturing. There was not much for a narrative. It was filled with endless descriptions weaving a world beyond my imagination.

I could never match the effectiveness of the original text and I have since burned The Book in frustration so I will have to make do with my approximations of its contents. It writ visions of flesh and sunlight into my mind. It filled my head with hushed voices that spoke nothing but that nothing put me at peace. It filled my nostrils with the scent of heat and musk, my mouth with the taste of salt and sweetness. The only thing it did not give me was the sensation of touch. That must have been why The Book felt the way it did.

I devoured the contents of The Book in the course of what felt like a single evening. Now that I think back on it, it must have been longer as The Book was over a thousand pages. I simply sat down with it and did not rise again until I was done.

I remained for a few moments mulling over the experience, finding that the details were fuzzy. Despite that, it was an exhilarating read. Endless pleasures had filled each of my senses until the end. I looked around and the world felt duller than I remembered. I thought little of it at first. Sometimes there is an adjustment period coming back down from a good book. Perhaps I just needed to sleep.

The next morning, however, things still felt off. I tried my best to push through the usual day-to-day processes. I barely stomached my meals, trudged through the dreariness of interacting with coworkers, and struggled through the emptiness of a life lived mostly alone.

These things had never bothered me so much before. I had thought myself satisfied with the life I had built. Every brick in it had been carefully chosen to guarantee my success and satisfaction but suddenly I hated every moment. What was the point of living in a world so bland and lifeless? Lifeless in comparison to that Book.

I pushed the thought away. It was simply a bigger comedown than expected for such an astounding book. That made the most sense. I just needed more time to readjust to real life again.

But no amount of time seemed to be enough. No other books from my collection could hold my focus. My output at work faltered. I barely ate. My dreams were full of a faded recollection of what The Book had shown me, a memory that seemed to fade more and more each day that passed. My body screamed as it left me, wanting to experience such pleasures once more. I had no choice but to open The Book and fulfill its desire.

It was even better a second time. After all the time running from the idea that it was The Book itself I was craving, finding my way back was jumping into a pool at the height of summer. It washed over every inch of my body and filled me until I once again felt whole. The imagery was clearer. The sounds crisper. The scents stronger. The taste more intense. I awoke the next morning clutching The Book to my chest.

I kept The Book on hand from then on. Outside of the safety of my home, I could only read in bits, often just a single word at a time, without the risk of losing track of myself. Sometimes all I could handle was a caress of the cover but I needed it to get through the little moments in the day. Those lulls where there was nothing or the spikes where it was all too much. It occupied my mind. Calmed me. Kept me from tipping off the edge of everything.

I noticed that the world felt a little clearer right after reading. It was only for a few minutes, at most half an hour, but it was enough to get me through the days.

I kept The Book hidden away from everyone else. They did not need to know. It was my Book. I knew there must be other copies out there but something about it felt like something to keep to myself. No one else could be trusted with the knowledge of its contents. No one else deserved it.

I found that over time, the effects began to wane. At first, it just seemed that the clarity was shorter. Then, came a need to read more to get the same feeling. Eventually, there was no clarity after the fact, just an emptiness that I could never seem to shake without The Book. Even then, it appeared The Book gave me less and less each time. Its effect was lessening every look. Every touch.

I grew frustrated with my life again. I wished I could just spend every day, every moment, reading The Book and living within the feeling it gave me. I would spend my days off work reading it over and over to fill the void that had begun to grow in me. I started leaving The Book at home given it no longer helped. I thought maybe the distance throughout the day might keep it from my thoughts. It did not.

Eventually, I could no longer stand any time spent away from The Book and refused to leave my home. I spent all the time I could with it until one day, I finished The Book and felt… nothing. Its words no longer stirred me the way they had before. I could stroke its cover for some subtle feeling, but it was all just memory once more. Memory that I knew would fade before long.

My first attempt to ease my panic was to look up The Author anywhere I could. I checked the libraries in the area but at each one, I found the same situation. There were books listed in the files but none were to be found on the shelves. It seemed they had all been checked out and never returned. I wondered how I had gotten mine.

It was hard to tell where it had come from. I was a collector of books. I would stop at almost any bookstore I could find and peruse their wares for anything that stood out. That was where I went next: every bookstore within reach. I would burst in, likely seeming crazed, and ask about The Author, if they had any information for me.

When my search was done, I had acquired three additional tomes. None of them stood out as anything unusual by their looks. Their covers were what one would usually expect from an older book. They smelled like old paper. They were average in every conceivable way.

Visitations to the Gamma Realm was similar in structure to The Book but meandered on long tangents that added nothing to the experience. The places it described were nowhere near captivating enough to fill the hole The Book had left inside me.

Planet Crash had a narrative of a space explorer finding themselves stranded on an uncolonized planet and searching for a means to survive and escape. While some of the things the protagonist experienced reminded me of The Book, I felt nothing when I read it.

Unnourished wove a tale of a creature finding unimaginable happiness for the briefest of moments and never being able to recreate that feeling no matter what it did. A heartwrenching read, but it only served to deepen the void growing inside me every moment.

This endeavor had been meaningless in the end. None of these other books gave me even a fraction of a fraction of what I felt just touching The Book months earlier. I grew increasingly frustrated and began to need to carry The Book with me just to operate at all. The image in my mind had dimmed. The whispers had fallen out of range. The scent was fading. The taste washed away from my tongue.

I just wished to have them all once more. The only thing that kept me together was running my hands over The Book. It gave me so little but it was enough. Just barely enough. I had to find a way to bring back the other sensations.

I don’t know how long it took to decide on what to do nor how long it took to find the people to do it. I had long since stopped keeping track of time. I sold every single thing I could. Liquidated my book collection. Every piece of art that hung on the walls of my home. Every piece of furniture I could live without. I stripped my house bare to gather as much funds as I could.

Having consolidated so much money, I then hunted down the best in each of the required fields for what I needed: a painter, a composer, a chandler, and a confectioner. I paid as much as they asked with no questions and allowed each of them access to The Book to create something that would return to me each of those experiences. By the time each was finished, the memories had all but faded from me and the withdrawal was anguish.

The painter was my first find. I commissioned a 24”x36” rendition of the most rousing scene The Book had on offer. I don’t have any memories of the period I spent without The Book while he was working on the painting. When it arrived, I had it hung in the middle of the wall and simply admired it.

It was a little odd to see another person’s interpretation of what I had only seen in my mind. Odder still, it was almost exactly the same visual as in my nearly lost memory. The colors were each so perfect, as if he had seen just what I’d seen, and only the variability of the human hand accounted for what differences were there. I paid the man extra for his service and sent him away.

I must have basked in the painting for days before I continued my endeavor. Next was the composer. I paid her to convert one of the passages of auditory description to a score and have it recorded. Luckily, she had plenty of connections and was a choral conductor as well. Another blank passage of time went by before she arrived at my doorstep with a record.

The soundscape had been pressed in a locked groove so that it would loop eternally until I turned it off. Once again, it was odd to hear another person’s interpretation of The Book and how similar it was to what I had imagined. Each voice in the choir seemed to have been chosen as though the composer had heard exactly what I had heard. She conducted it exquisitely and no sound felt out of place. I paid her extra and sent her on her way as well.

I had similar experiences with the chandler and the confectioner. A near-perfect candle and a bag of candies that tasted almost exactly how I expected. Each paid extra accordingly. The four artists spoke to me a small amount of their experiences with The Book but I urged them to keep it from their minds. Mine was the only copy I knew of and I was not interested in being rid of it for any price.

I closed all the doors, covered all the windows, and sat in my drawing room, bringing together all of the pieces. The painting hung on the wall. The record played on the gramophone behind me. The candle burned nearby filling the room with its scent. I placed one of the candies in my mouth and stroked The Book in my lap. Yes, this was almost exactly what I wanted. It was so close that I could-

Suddenly, I was elsewhere. I was there. The realm described by The Book. I sunk deep into the sea of sunlight. Pink, fawn, taupe, ochre, beige, gold, brown. Warm, cool, deep, rich, pale, tan, dark. The sand and the sea. An autumn afternoon. Calla lilies. Roses. Seashells. Cattails. Poppies. Cacao. Nectar. Ambrosia. Venus. Adonis. A geyser. A waterfall. The afterglow of sunset. Every sight, every sound, every scent, every taste, every…

Touch? Touch. Here I could reach out and touch everything. The Book felt nowhere near as good as this. Smooth sand. Flower petals. Cool water. Fallen leaves. More than I could describe. Much more than the subtle texture of The Book. So much more than my mind could have ever fathomed. I let it all wash through me until I was blank. My worries, my fears, my frustrations all assuaged. My needs, my dreams, my desires all fulfilled. I had no need to think again.

Then, I woke. The painting was shredded. The candle had burned out. I had devoured the entire bag of candies. The record skipped. When I checked it, deep gashes had been cut into the vinyl. All I had left was The Book. Yet, it was… different. The texture that had made it special was gone. I ran my hands over it, searching for something, anything, that might remind me of what it had been before.

It was just like any other book in my library now. I skimmed its pages and found nothing stood out to me. Taking it with me, I emerged from my drawing room to find it was midday, overcast.

The recollection of my time Over There was already fading from me. The air on my skin felt heavy and oppressive. Breathing itself was draining. I caressed the book for comfort and once again found nothing.

Enraged, I stormed to the kitchen, started the oven, and hucked the book inside. How could it draw me in like this only to leave me behind? How could I ever match that feeling again? I knew that I couldn’t. Nothing I could do now would ever return it.

Even if the painter remade the painting, the composer re-pressed the record, the chandler made another candle, and the confectioner brought me another bag of candies, I knew that book was the key. Without it, I was lost. I had nothing. I could do nothing. My purpose had been scrubbed and replaced with a hunger for that feeling. A hunger I will never sate again.

I am writing all this before I lose myself. The people who were once in my life are owed some kind of explanation before I disappear. The world itself feels unbearably heavy now, and I will be finding my way out of it one way or another. I apologize to those I have neglected and will continue to neglect. I just cannot stand this a moment longer.

Do not look for me. I am no longer who you knew and will never be again. Goodbye.