Anybody Working out at steamboat tennis athletic club looking for a workout partner between the hours of 6:30 to 9 PM or 7 to 10am Wednesday through Sunday, Saturday and Sunday starting at 8 AM.
I have stood for years in falling snow,
outside your glass and golden glow,
watching joy like a pageant I’ll never be cast in,
my breath on the pane, always asked in silence.
My hands were never cold enough
to justify knocking.
My grief never loud enough
to stop your talking.
So I just watched—
like frost on the edge of your memory,
a ghost with no tragedy
you’d dare claim.
But I remember names you never knew,
stories you were too warm to hear,
and the weight of silence
that made a man out of fear.
Now I do not wish for your fire.
I’ve made my own:from scraps of rejection,
from splinters of “not good enough,”
from the holy rage of still being here
when I was supposed to disappear.
And I tell you now,
with snow at my heels and ash in my chest—
I was never waiting for you to let me in.
I was becoming something you cannot contain.
When you are starving, crumbs feel like a feast. This is true of the body, but even more true of the heart. Deprived long enough of love, tenderness, recognition, or steady care, a person can begin to mistake the smallest offerings for abundance. A delayed text becomes devotion. Fleeting affection becomes intimacy. Bare minimum effort is received as generosity. The starving heart, desperate to survive, makes a banquet out of almost nothing.
There is no shame in this hunger. Need is not weakness. Longing is not stupidity. It is simply what happens when something essential has gone unmet for too long. We are creatures built for connection. When connection is scarce, we adapt in the only ways we know how. We stretch moments into meaning. We turn gestures into promises. We season crumbs with imagination until they resemble bread.
But hunger distorts proportion. Scarcity changes the eye. A person who has known plenty can recognize crumbs for what they are and leave them on the table. A person in famine may clutch them with gratitude. The difference is not character; it is condition.
This is why so many people remain in one-sided relationships, tolerate neglect, chase unavailable affection, or defend those who give them little. Outsiders often call it foolishness. It is more often survival. To the well-fed observer, it looks irrational. To the starving soul, it feels necessary.
Yet there is a cost to surviving on scraps. The body bears it first. Sleep grows restless. Shoulders tighten. Appetite changes. Anxiety hums beneath the skin. Exhaustion becomes a personality trait. The nervous system, made to rest in safety, learns instead to live in uncertainty. The heart’s famine eventually reaches the bones.
Then comes the crueler cost: meaning itself begins to warp. The starving heart can turn half-love into holy scripture, reading sacred truth into empty pages. It can mistake intermittent warmth for lasting devotion. It can treat possibility as if it were promise. Hope becomes both shelter and trap.
At some point, many souls face a painful awakening. They realize the scripture is blank. The promises were never promises. The feast was assembled from crumbs and longing. This recognition can feel devastating, because it carries two griefs at once: grief for what was missing, and grief for the years spent believing otherwise.
And yet awakening is not only loss. It is also the first honest meal. Truth may be bitter, but it nourishes more than illusion. To see clearly is painful, but pain in the service of reality heals differently than pain in the service of fantasy.
Some never awaken fully, and that too deserves compassion. Sometimes belief itself is what kept them alive. Human beings survive on stories more often than we admit. Even misplaced hope can carry someone through dark seasons they might not otherwise endure.
Still, there comes a moment in many lives when the heart must choose: continue calling crumbs a feast, or risk the terror of an empty table while waiting for something real.
That waiting can feel unbearable. But emptiness with dignity is often kinder than abundance made of lies.
The starving heart is not foolish for wanting more. It was only starving. And once it learns the difference between nourishment and scraps, it becomes far less willing to beg at tables where it is never truly fed.