FAMINELY (the Absent Parent(s) effect)

FAMINELY

There is a kind of hunger that doesn't start in the stomach.

It begins in the space between a newborn’s cry

and the silence that answers it.

Not the comforting hush of a held child—

but the cold absence.

The still air.

The flicker of a screen lighting a mother’s face

as she scrolls past the sound.

The breast is replaced by a bottle

that is tilted by a hand

that is thinking of other things.

The eyes that once locked in primal bond

are now distracted,

tired,

gone.

The father steps in,

shoulders slumped with the weight of not-enough.

He smells like exhaustion—

like trains, like missed moments.

He looks at the child

as if trying to remember

what it was he promised.

He doesn’t stay long.

Just long enough

to touch the air near the crib,

and vanish into the next demand.

We were meant to be touched.

To be sung to,

sweated on,

suckled,

rocked until the boundaries between self and other dissolved.

Instead—

we are weaned on distance.

Soothed by algorithms.

Raised by convenience.

And the child learns.

How to be quiet.

How not to need.

How to shrink the ache to something manageable,

even if it means losing parts of herself.

This isn’t a wound you see.

It’s a slow starvation.

A famine of the soul. Faminely.

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