Desireless

I desire desire I suppose. I desire to truly know what desire is. I had a friend tell me recently that our emotions are entirely limited by the words we have to describe them. For example: happiness – I have a general idea of the concept of happiness; I am even approaching certainty that I feel it periodically, but I am also aware that feeling happiness isn’t as simple as the definition implicates. There is much more emotion involved in happiness than the word can encapsulate. Since I have no words other than happy to describe those emotions (perhaps it’s just an issue of vocabulary) my communication is limited and therefore I will never fully express myself. Desire is the same; let’s just say the definition of desire leaves something to be desired.

Desire…desire I’m pretty sure I’ve felt. There was this one time I saw a very pretty girl in a café and I desired her – we dated for two years and she cheated on me in the end; I guess she desired something else. That wasn’t the only time I felt desire, but it’s a good example.

The desire I see in the commercials I don’t know if I’ve ever felt that. Sometimes when I see Matthew McConaughey driving in his Lincoln and he’s going really super duper fast and he smiles a wry smile at me – probably because he’s pleased with the lack of traffic – I think “I kind of want that”, but then I remember that really weird salacious thing he said “[t]hat’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age” and how his face is turning into a leather handbag and I think “No I don’t”.

My point here is that I don’t know if I’ve ever felt something without simultaneously being ambivalent. I desire to feel desire in its purest form. I want to feel unadulterated desire. I don’t even need to want it bad – like Matthew McConaughey tells me I need to feel it in the commercials. Even if I just feel a tiny desire, as long as I know I am feeling it, and I know without any hesitation, doubt, or regret that I want something. Wow, what a beautiful feeling that would be.

I would tell everyone I had done it. I would exclaim “I felt something!”. I would do everything in my power to retain that feeling. If it was a girl I wanted – restraining order. If it was money I wanted – burn it all. If I desired to be beautiful – I’d look in the mirror. Just so I could truly feel something for as long as possible. I would find a distant cave to dwell in where what I desired could never reach me. My muscles would atrophy and my clothes would tear, turn gray, act as vestiges of my past life, and I would make a shrine to my desire in the darkest corner of that cave. I would crawl up to it, like golem approaching his precious, with furtive and wary glances scared that I might accidently discover its fragility, and I would wallow in it; I would sit content knowing that I was feeling something.

People would come to visit me like an enlightened Indian guru; they would come to see the person who had finally felt something. After making the long arduous journey up the mountainside to reach my cave I would make them bow before me while I turned my head towards the sun up and away from them because I like formalities like that. Then they would ask “What does it feel like?” and I would say “It feels like… desire”.