Hungry
by Georgia Cloepfil
My family used to tell me I ate like a growing boy. I wonder where all of the extra went. Did it come out the soles of my feet, or the top of my head when I ran? I think about how a body uses time and energy, how it burns itself up. At my hungriest, I finished an entire entrée of ravioli before my family had been served and then ordered a second plate. At other times, I barely skimmed the top of the salad bar offerings: shaved beets, spinach, sunflower seeds.
In Tibetan Buddhism, hungry ghosts dwell in their own realm on the Wheel of Life. They are teardrop-shaped and have a neck so thin that to eat would be painful, to swallow impossible. They have “mouths the size of a needle’s eye and a stomach the size of a mountain.” These ghosts are representative of souls who, even in afterlife, are saddled with terrestrial, material desires.
The soccer landscape of my childhood was dotted with fast food and truck stop dinners. Sub sandwiches and spaghetti. On the bus, piles of damp pizza boxes in the aisle and liters of soda poured into open mouths. This kind of food was not meant to taste good, to be savored or enjoyed. It was sustenance; there is a 30-minute window after concluding exercise in which you should refuel the body.
Before the Olympics one summer, Michael Phelps documented his daily food intake for a reporter at the New York Times. Breakfast: three fried-egg sandwiches, coffee, a five-egg omelet, a bowl of grain, three slices of French toast, three pancakes. Lunch: one pound of pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches, energy drinks. Dinner: one pound of pasta, an entire pizza, energy drinks.
Most teams I played for had us wear GPS devices that tracked how many calories we burned, how fast we accelerated and how much distance we covered in a single game or a practice. The average training: 1,500, 30.1, 6.1.
You can get tired of eating when you have to eat so much. Some elite athletes consume nearly 8,000 calories to break even. My number was closer to 4,000 but it still drove me crazy. I ate toast or ice cream to pad the stats. I got full before I had eaten enough, so I ate six times a day. When I added things up, I was often barely at 2,000. I wondered where my body stole from to get the rest.
When I played in Korea, I could request whatever food I wanted before a game. Each week I ordered grilled steak, greens, omelets and rice, with sides of kimchi and soybeans. The team ate meals three hours before the game and I stayed at the table long after my teammates had excused themselves, finishing off every bowl of bapsang, every grain of rice. On days when we needed extra, they sent boxes of fried chicken to our rooms before bed and I sat with my teammates in a circle on the floor eating until it was gone, licking fingers. When we played well, we were treated to barbequed eel or intestines. When we played poorly, we ran laps around the almost-concrete playing field, pounding our legs and backs into submission. We played poorly enough, for long enough, that I developed a herniated disc in my back. I could feel it bulge and resonate with every step, but I couldn’t stop running.
In our limited free time, I went with my teammates to 7/11 and bought snacks. The convenience store had the comforts and the fluorescence of home. The snacks were much the same, too – Pringles, Kit-Kat, Coca Cola. But everything had a different flavor: green tea and cherry blossom chocolate, lychee soda. I learned to say yes to all food as I had learned to say yes to contract stipulations, flight times and living arrangements. When my new friend held out a Dixie cup full of boiled chrysalis, I skewered one bug with a toothpick and crunched into its liquid-filled shell. The taste of soil and blood.
An old teammate wrote about her retirement in a blog. Only after she quit, she wrote, did she begin to identify the small and pervasive stresses that she had grown accustomed to living with. A ceaseless chorus of questions. What if I walk there instead of drive? What if I have a glass of wine with dinner? What if I have an apple instead of a banana? What if I don’t sleep enough? The constant labor of eating and hydrating. Hunger can be the loudest thing in a person’s head.
At my college, football players were instructed by nutritionists and coaches to eat multiple burgers at each meal. They gorged themselves to gain weight, to bulk up, to listen to their coach, to be better at their sport. They gathered in groups on bar stools and ate straight through the hour-long mealtime. When their careers ended, this eating was one of the last habits to die. I watched graduating seniors sit in the dining hall alone, wondering when they should stop, fingering catsup onto their patties.
I think of the hungry ghosts, milling about on the edges of life and death. Their realm is just above hell and just below the human. The ghosts are each held back in different ways. Some of them have external obstacles; they are thirsty and see a stream far away that eludes them. These ghosts can never find what they need. Other ghosts struggle against more internal obstacles. Water will evaporate before it gets through their microscopic mouths and into their bellies. These ghosts can never satisfy their hunger or their thirst.
Desire to improve, desire to win, above all the desire to continue. When I stopped playing, I knew I would have to learn how to move less, how to eat less and how to feel fullness. Hunger encompasses both a lack and a craving; the word is a sealed loop of longing and fulfillment. If I am hungry, I am empty. If I am hungry, I eat more.
Georgia Cloepfil, originally from Portland, Oregon, is currently an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Idaho. Her work has been previously published at n+1 and Howler Magazine and has been featured on The Rumpus, Longreads, and WBUR Boston. She was listed a semi-finalist for the 2020 Southeast Review Ned-Stuckey Prize for nonfiction. She is working on a book-length work about playing professional women’s soccer around the world.