No matter what age you are or where you’re from, you understand hunger. That rumbling in your belly, the weakness in your stance, it is all an indication of need. Need so primitive that even children can understand it yet so potent that it can fell the strongest adults. It hurts, the emptiness, the hollow calling, begging to be filled. Things begin to dull, to lose shape. But once that need is met, balance is restored. The earth begins to reform and fill with color, and music sings its sweet refrain with a renewed vigor.

Survivorship is the memory of hunger. The hunger for life, for one more day, one more smile, one more embrace, just one more. When your body fails, all you have left to hold on to is your desperate hunger for me. Until you are filled.

It is strange, to feel steady after walking through the shadow of death. All you can think is, is this real? But you know it has to be, because for the first time you don’t feel that hunger that ached and twisted for years inside of you. All that remains is a wisp, a memory, soon overwhelmed by the fascinations of a life filled with color, music, and laughter.

But that memory remains. That hunger, which governed your life in sickness, now fuels you in health. You are no longer controlled by it, but now you have forged it into a flame. A flame that inspires you to demand more of yourself, of your life. Why should that hunger be confined to a cage of desperation? It shouldn’t.

That hunger, that survivor’s flame, allows you to be bold. To take life and live it daringly, wasting no time. To be a survivor is to know life’s fragility as well as its promises.