THE DISCOURSE OF DESIRE

You did not want it.

You wanted the wanting.

This is the sentence the whole arrangement of your adult life has been built to keep you from finishing.

I am going to finish it for you and then sit with you in the small room that opens up after.

You think you want the job.

You think you want the person.

You think you want the apartment, the body, the trip, the kind of evening other people seem to have on the streets of cities you are not currently in.

You do not.

You want the thing that is happening inside you while you imagine getting it.

That thing has a temperature.

It has a forward lean.

It feels like being alive.

It feels like the next minute matters.

What you are doing when you reach for the thing is reaching for that.

The thing is the cover story your mind tells you to keep the reaching going.

I am not saying this to be clever.

I am saying it because I watched it in myself for years and I watched everyone around me deny it for the same years and the denial is the load-bearing wall of an entire civilization.

You can test the sentence yourself.

Think of the last thing you got that you had been wanting for a year.

The promotion.

The relationship.

The car.

The move.

Take a minute and find it.

Then find the day it arrived.

Then find the day after that.

Then find the day a week after that.

Where did the feeling go.

You will say it faded.

You will say that is just how feelings work.

You will say the body adjusts and the new becomes the normal and the normal stops registering.

This is a respectable answer.

It is also the lie.

The feeling did not fade.

The feeling moved.

It moved to the next thing.

It moved on its own, without consulting you, because the feeling was never about the thing in the first place.

It was about the forward lean.

The thing was a stage prop the feeling needed in order to have somewhere to point.

You are inside an engine that needs somewhere to point.

When one prop falls, the engine reaches for the next.

You did not choose the next.

The engine chose, and your mind ran into the room with a story about why you have always actually been more interested in this other thing, and you nodded along because the story arrived faster than the question would have.

You have been doing this since you were small enough to want a different toy.

I have watched people in their fifties do this with houses.

I have watched people in their sixties do this with grandchildren they were supposed to be already arrived for.

The reaching does not soften with age.

It just changes costumes.

The thing nobody tells you, because the people who could tell you are mostly selling something, is that there is no arrival.

There never was.

The arrival is a feature of the brochure, not the trip.

You bought the brochure.

You spent your twenties working for the brochure.

Your thirties trying to make the brochure happen and quietly noticing that even the parts that did happen did not match the picture.

Your forties, if you are someone who lets themselves look, watching the brochure dissolve in your hand while the wanting walks calmly into the next room.

This is the place where most writing on the subject gets soft.

This is the place where the words gratitude and presence and contentment show up.

I am not going to use them.

Those words are the brochure for the brochure.

They are a way to keep the engine running on different fuel and pretend something has changed.

What is actually there, underneath, is something else.

The engine is a piece of you.

You did not choose it.

You did not install it.

It was there before you knew you had a self.

It will be there when whatever you currently call your self has been replaced three times over.

You cannot turn it off by deciding to.

You cannot meditate it into stillness, despite what is being sold to you on that subject in particular.

What you can do is the thing almost nobody does.

You can watch it.

Not from across the street.

From the inside.

You can sit with the wanting as it forms and notice the moment it attaches to an object and notice the way the object will fall away after.

You can let the wanting happen without giving it the body.

Not because you are disciplined.

Because you have seen the trick.

The first time you see the trick you do not believe it.

The fifth time you see it you start to suspect.

The fiftieth time you have stopped following the reaching to the place it claims to point, because you have been to that place fifty times and the place was empty fifty times and you are tired of the trip.

This is not enlightenment.

This is not a state.

There is no system that produces it.

I do not have a system to sell you.

I have a sentence and a small room.

The sentence is the one I gave you at the top.

The room is the place inside you where the engine runs.

If you walk in there even once with your eyes open, the deal you have been making with the engine stops being invisible.

You may still make the deal.

Most people do.

But the deal will not be the same deal, because you will know that you are the one making it, and the engine will know that you know, and a small honest thing will live in the corner of the room for the rest of your life.

That small honest thing is the closest I can get you to peace with this part of being a person.

I cannot get you closer.

Nobody can.

The ones who say they can are selling you the next brochure.