The Duality of Wanting

The Want Series, Pt. 1

“There is no calamity greater than lavish desires.”- Lao Tzu

Did the yearning quickly turn into aching? Or was it so foul, and so unfortunate, and so bare inside, as you felt your lips dry against the car window, that you watched yourself become the perfect example for why many religions deem it a great sin?

When you first meet eye-to-eye, finger-to-finger with your wanting, it can feel pleasant to the touch, tempting even. Then it’s the slow, loving grab of a face. Then it’s the delectable feeling of finally drooling over something again. Then it’s the subtle sensation of a lasso’s sudden tug around your shoulders as your bikini’d body lays out on a pool chair. You’re being chosen to want this.

The next moment, it becomes simply unbearable. The wanting has grown into a huge house that’s taken the boyish liberty of carving itself well into your pelvis. You’re thrusting your hands up as if to surrender, like “please, I cannot withstand this,” like “maybe I don’t want you anymore” but it’s already made itself comfortable inside of you like the brave bug in your flat that you know is alive but is pretending to be dead, un-moving. You are not sure of whether the house is living inside of you, or if you are living inside of it. It feels like both are occurring simultaneously, maybe. One minute, it surrounds and confines you. The next minute, you are trapping and swallowing it, willing it to stay down. The house will take the perverted form of twenty-two shavings of spilled glass that will poke away at your skin until they slowly but surely come into contact with a vital vein and stab into it. I want, I want, I want.

If you opened my soul, you’d see a whining child sitting alone. Perhaps it’s not the wanting, but the torturous and sobering reality of the not-having.

Because the wanting feels so good—when you know you can have the thing. You can make the coveted person fall in love with you. You can be thin. book that dream gig. Make the ravens sing. The sky wild. The green grass spring. It’s a shock of light that flights the very tips of your scalp. A friendly entity that continues to pull you out of your lame bedsheet. Is this hope, perhaps? It’s also an indication that you aren’t the jaded washout you feared you were. You can sense it on every table, taste it in your shower water, and as you drive, you can feel the faint and mysterious shine of it, saying “hey! you’re not a washout!” You fantasize about a near future in which you do finally get the thing, sinking your teeth into the fig of the thing, strolling through the tightly-packed city of the thing, feeling the gratification of embodying a version of a you that you once weren’t, and now you are because of the thing. The dancing in your eyes. The magic in your step. And it’s right there. Oh it’s so there.

Until it’s not.

Until one day, you catch a glimpse of your dumb little dream in the dirty rear view. You’ve missed it. It’s now far behind you, like a dead deer in the hazy distance.

Because you’ve never been able to control when you’re allowed to imagine yourself “having it.” It’s the “wanting it” that never leaves. The playful child’s frisbee slams your head. The screen goes blue and static. The birds go silent. Did I really think this was possible? That I, ME, I could achieve this? How foolish am I? Now you’re left to deal with it: the ghost of your own wanting, the monster of your own not-having. Every single frame of your life serves as breathing, beating, irrefutable evidence that you do not yet have it. Harvard’s finest lawyers would not win this case in court. Before you know it, you’re sitting in a carpeted living room filled with people you somehow know and love, wondering— is life just this? A constant, unending cycle of wanting?

I believe I dreamt of this body at one point, too, though.

I realize it finally— I am in every short story that I’ve dreamt up.

In dreams of various hectic cities and handsome faces, I am the one sitting at the quiet bar on 6th, I am the one being kissed.

Maybe it is me, I’m the thing.

I am the thing I so desperately want.