A Story Before Valentine - by Godwin Erite

We are born hungry.  Not just for milk or warmth, but for the world to bend to our cries. Think of it: a newborn’s wail cares nothing for sleepless nights or cracked hearts. It demands. It takes. It survives. This is our first truth, raw and unpolished. Selfishness isn’t a flaw, it’s a blueprint. A survival script etched into our bones long before we learn to apologize for existing.  But time dresses our instincts in finer clothes.  We grow. We become polite. We say “please” and “thank you” and “I’m here for you” yet beneath the sincere gaze, the pulse of me still thrums. Our minds spin gold from straw, painting our choices as noble, our silence as wisdom, our retreats as necessity. We are all unreliable narrators, editing our stories to crown ourselves heroes.  History knows this.  We build monuments to ancestors we’ve romanticized but never truly seen. Their suffering becomes a backdrop to our progress, their sacrifices reduced to footnotes in our epic stories. A child cries over a missed toy, blind to the parent’s silent exhaustion. A lover withdraws, armored in hurt, deaf to the unspoken plea beneath their partner’s sharp words. We are all, in some small way, that child. That lover.  My own awakening came in a grocery store.  A stranger dropped her groceries, cans clattering, apples rolling and I hesitated. Not out of malice, but inconvenience. My mind whispered, “You’re late. Let someone else help.” Logic, cold and gleaming, justified it. But the shame lingered. How many times had I chosen the path of least resistance, mistaking it for virtue? How often do we all?  Selfishness is not always a bomb. Sometimes, it’s a slow leak.  Consider Jane and Jude.  Once, they shared secrets like oxygen, breathing each other in. But life grew thorns. Jude drowned in a silent crisis; Jane, in her own storms, didn’t see the cracks in his voice. When he finally reached out, her reply was a delayed text, half-read. Jude stopped reaching out. Jane stopped asking. No villains here, only two people clutching their own pain, forgetting that hands full of stones cannot hold each other.  This is how love unravels. Not with screams, but with sighs.  Yet here’s the secret they don’t tell you:  Awareness is a rebellion.  To admit, “I am selfish” is to crack the armor. It’s in that fracture that light slips in. You learn to pause when instinct says “take.”bYou choose the heavier lift—the apology, the inconvenient kindness, the listening when you’d rather speak. Selflessness isn’t a purity; it’s a practice. A daily war against the gravity of me.  But don’t mistake this for absolution.  We are always one step from slipping. Wars start when fear dresses up as righteousness. Betrayals bloom when "I deserve” poisons “we promised.” Even kindness can be transactional—a coin tossed into the well of our own egos, waiting for an echo.  So let me ask you:  When you last said “I love you,” did you mean “I need you to love me”?  When you gave advice, was it to lift them, or to quiet their chaos so you could breathe easier?  This is the dance. The tightrope. The work.  We are selfish creatures. But we are also creatures who choose.  To see the hunger in ourselves is to starve it, bite by bite. To reach, again and again, beyond the limits of our own skin. To love, not because it’s easy, but because we’ve decided the world is better when it’s not just about us.  So yes, we are born hungry.

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