It is a cultural thing to eat with one’s hands:
coming from one of the many archipelagos in Asia,
it is a cultural thing to touch food directly here.
It is more than a cultural thing, if one thinks about it
how else did everyone else’s ancestors eat before the invention of chopsticks?
I usually eat with chopsticks, sometimes accompanied with a spoon
both either metal or wood or some other food-grade material
and rarely with just my bare hands even if the meal is seafood
fresh from the tropical seas near the lake where I live
I would peel shrimps with two sticks using one hand
or else wait for someone else to shell crabs for me
However today I find myself putting down the cold metal utensils
and replacing the distance between my hands and this fast-food with nothing
I instinctively collected hours-old rice with one hand
and there was a burger in the other. Both slightly spicy as my nose feels the warmth.
My mother laughs as she witness the once-in-a-blue-moon thing
because I don’t often eat like this. I try, if possible, to simply not eat
when my heart is beating too fast but right now my stomach is screaming as well.
Both sounds compete with the ones in my head: all the thoughts
that have been running around in circles for weeks now.
They have been tiring me out more than the hours-long walkscapades
which I take every morning, when I can help it, so that I can tone my legs
and clear my mind before I take on once again everything I had left on my desk behind.
Except that isn’t really true because I always end up just taking everything with me
so I walk every morning with weighted arms and ankles.
Maybe that is why it takes a while for me to realise it’s already breakfast.
So today for lunch, I eat because I am starving and because I feel anxious
I eat with my bare hands instead. Maybe this is an attempt to get ahold of reality
once more: the physical world. I feel I had been stuck in my head for too long
thinking of the things I should be doing instead of doing them.
And even when I do them, they seem to always be centred around ideas, ideas, ideas
My hands long to feel something before it ends up like my heart: now numb
which is why I eat spicy food in an attempt to thaw it
all from years of growing up with a misplaced misanthropy.
Now I cannot even bear the feeling of stuffing myself full.
I simply want to get rid of the hungry and move on
in hopes that when I do, I may be able to tackle everything else one at a time
one by one, clearing my mind so that I may get it off of ideas
and into where my hands are in contact with, whether that is food or paint or ink
or the fast pulse beating of my heart.