Everlasting Desire

Normally I wouldn’t tack up any of my own personal writing here, but I recently did an exercise with a group of writers that was interesting and thought-provoking enough for me to mention, and I figured what the hell: it was a simple exercise, not an attempt at brilliance. Short and weak enough that I don’t really care, I’ll throw her on up here. The exercise is worth considering 

What was the first thing you can remember asking for as a child? Write about that, either through fiction, poetry, or fuck it - paint a picture. Art's pliant; whatever your medium, work it. What did you want? Why did you want it? What did it look like, taste like, sound like, feel like, etcetera. And did you get it? If so, was it worth it? And if not, then what? We’re social animals. As animals, we're marked by our desires. Pretty much all religion attempts to put a muzzle on desire, but they're part of who we are, earthly and humane and carnal desires. These may or may not be more substantial and impressive than the desires of, say, your standard housedog. Nevertheless, we, as people, don’t ever stop yearning, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing depending on where the crosshairs of our desires tend to gravitate. If there's an American author who wrote about desires in just the precise way, it's Kerouac, who said both "“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them” and “all human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together," encompassing both the necessity for and the pitfalls of desire. I don’t need much in the way of confirmation that I’m a little bit (quite so) bizarre, but this certainly did the job. For the life of me I couldn’t actually remember any things, as in objects or items or other trinkets typically procured through a pecuniary exchange that I asked for; I did, however, remember asking for other things, slightly more impalpable and therefore impossible requests. Quite clearly I remembered the first thing I desperately wanted. To this day, I still think this is an important question.

“Space. Is there a way you can lower it down, like a big dark flag, the kind we have outside school?” I roved my eyes over them both: mom's face smaller than ever, round, stripped of makeup, and severe; my father's vice-like, narrow, an unkempt dusting of gray covering the skin of his chin that had softened with the onset of his fiftieth year. “Can you, can anyone, please bring me space." To drive home that I was serious, I had to keep looking around, back and forth between them. "Up there," I pointed, "haul it down here?” At six years old, I wanted space—as in an outer inner world, as in cosmological infinitude, as in room to breathe, as in dead and broken banana-colored stars hanging from the detritus coat hangers of a distant galaxy, as in my own room. They wanted me to clarify, always be clearer. A family (meaning the men) maxim: A man must be direct, like a gritty brick to the skull; he knows what he wants, but moreover, how to articulate it. “How would you measure it?” my father asked. Space? I hardly knew what he meant.  “How many teaspoons will it take?” my mother wondered, already reaching into one of her many silverware-clinking drawers glinting from the sun storming through the open windowsill. The sun, from space. “I don't think I have enough,” she admitted, her voice worn by pity to an entropic murmur. “We can't go to the store,” my father reminded us, glancing from the want ads to where I sat knees-to-chest on the kitchen floor digging my fingernails into cracks set deep in the wooden planks wounded by dropped knives and plates and other bluntly shaped objects that my father swore would set us back thousands, maybe millions, “not until next month.” Space. I pined for space. How could I adequately explain this, at that age, without sounding insane? Even now, how can I? Between matter and nothing, between walls and openness, between rutted pastures and solitary confinement, between a vacuum of darkness and a vortex of scarce-but-enough luminescence, I wanted space. I said, “Can you bring down space? I want to sleep next to it to him to her—to space.”