More than half a lifetime ago, this metaphor stopped eating meat. Mostly because some patchouli-scented hippie told her that the panic animals feel when they're slaughtered is held in their bodies and when you eat them, you eat this fear. The metaphor was having horrible mind-sucking nightmares at the time and would seriously have given anything to make them stop, so she stopped eating meat, and while she still has perfectly bad dreams, they are not the kind where she wakes in sobs, soaked in terror, so: it works.
Every once in a while she'll take a run at meat again -- a bite of something that someone else says is amazing. Or sometimes it's accidental, like when everything was getting accessorized with bacon. Or delicious melted cheese stuffed with inexplicable chunks of ham. She usually tastes it and spits it out in a napkin or something. It makes her queasy but that could be psychosomatic so she doesn't consider it data. Mostly she doesn't eat it and she doesn't miss it, and along the way she's realized there are lots of reasons beyond the nightmares she remembers still so vividly to not eat meat: unsustainable farming practices, cruelty to the animal, health, heart disease, all the chewing, the bloated feeling of indulgence, etc. It feels safer to just avoid it altogether, and honestly veggie burgers are pretty delicious. Stir fry. The metaphor has learned a lot about spices.
Then one day someone gives the metaphor a steak. A grass-fed cow, massaged daily, prepared by an expert, perfect. While she would never have ordered it, it is somehow different if it is offered, put on a plate already. And the metaphor forgets some of her reasons and rationalizes the rest away. The metaphor pulls the plate towards herself and breathes the warmth that rises off of it, and her whole body responds to the smell, primal. It is tender and juicy, the knife reveals the subtle shadings of red, beautiful as an oil painting, and she only wishes she could chew for longer, the salt flesh wonder of it between her teeth, the taste she didn't know she was missing.
That night the metaphor curls into bed, nestles a pillow against her warm full belly, sighs with contentment. She cannot even believe she thought she didn't want steak! And she falls asleep dreaming of a future with more steak, burgers, breakfast sausages, all the things she realizes she'd been denying herself. Of course she wakes screaming, the terror again, wracked with pain. Choked with guilt for betraying herself. Of course she does. But it's okay, because she's just a metaphor.
The metaphor goes back to her vegetarian dishes; for a couple weeks she can't eat but then the appetite comes back. The metaphor's friends tell her she looks great, radiant even, pleased with her rediscovery of various spices, how it feels to burn and ice. And she is fine; the creativity required by the familiar is delicious and the nightmares fade. After all she doesn't even know what to do with meat, having spent nearly her entire adult life without it. There is a picnic with cheese and wine and grapes, and the metaphor closes her eyes against the summer sun and sees the light through her eyelids, that particular blood red, and her breath catches, but she doesn't have time to think about that anymore, and she opens her eyes and takes a perfect piece of cheese and holds it in her mouth, feels it dissolve.