When you've wanted something long enough, the want can become a part of you. Like pain. Or love, I suppose. You wake up and the desire is there settled in the back of your mind. You go about your day and ignore the nagging itch beneath your thoughts like an old mosquito bite that never goes completely away. When you go to bed, you barely notice the hollow part of you that aches to be filled with the object of your desire. Most wants are pretty simple, and easily sated. I want a piece of chocolate, I go unwrap a candy bar. Mission accomplished. I want to watch a television show, I plop down on the couch and channel surf until I find what I'm after and veg out til the happy ending. Boom, another job well done.
Some wants are impossible, and we know it. An old man wants to be young again, a mother wants her dead child back, a battered wife wants her husband to change. It's just not going to happen, and for better or worse we find ways to live with that. Sometimes it winds up destroying us, sometimes we come out stronger. Sometimes it just fucking hurts, and that turns into a new want: we just want to stop hurting, however we can, whatever it takes.
That's not the kind of desire I'm thinking of tonight.
There's another kind of want, and I think it's both the best and worst of all. It's the desire of something you perhaps could attain, but aren't certain you ever will. Kind of on the edge between the first two. It stays nestled in your thoughts, like a pet snake you never feed, and it lashes out in bitter resentment and gleeful mockery every time something new comes along to remind you of its presence. A lead weight chained to your future. And because you doubt you'll ever satisfy it, you just get used to its mass dragging against you. It becomes a part of you, and you simply have to get strong enough to carry both yourself and the distantly reachable desire. Like the training weights athletes use to condition their bodies -- that can never be removed.
Until one day, it is. You reach this goal you'd secretly thought was impossible, the desire goes away, and you're left...hollow. Even emptier than before. Oh, there's the satisfaction of achieving your target, certainly. It might even be enough to outweigh the accompanying negative emotions, who knows. But sure enough, there's still a feeling of...I don't know what the hell to call it. Disappointment, that there's nothing more to look forward to? Longing, for the old days when the goal was still on the horizon to tantalize with dim hope? Relief, that at long last some relaxation can be found and attention has been freed up for other subjects? Anger, because dammit you've worked your ass off to reach this point and this is all there is to greet you? Joy, because dammit you've worked your ass off to reach this point and this is pretty fucking incredible? Apathy, because at the end of the day nobody else really gives a shit?
Some impossible jumble of all of the above? None of the above? Something completely different?
I hate that feeling. I'm filled with it right now. I did something tonight I've wanted to do for years, almost a decade. Nothing earth-shattering or anything; I just got to finish an old cartoon series I started watching as a kid, and I finally got to see how it ended. It was...fitting, I guess. Watching through the next to last episodes made me feel sort of giddy, like a school kid finally getting to see behind the magician's curtain. But as I clicked the play button on the last episode, I experienced...remorse, I suppose would be the best word for it. I'd carried this desire, this need to finish that series with me since I was in grade school. It was kind of a part of me, like it or not. And pressing that play button meant I was slicing that part of myself away, ending that piece of me. The unknown, which in some idle moments my imagination had toyed with picturing all the possible outcomes, was burnt away and the story's solid conclusion was installed in its place. No more room for guessing, this was what happened.
I had a plain wooden block that could have been anything, and now it's been carved into shape and will never be anything else again. An empty cup to play with, but now it's full and all I can do is spill it. You know. A hundred other goofy zen examples or taoist tropes or whatever. The point is, finality can sometimes be just as unpleasant as continuation. Take whatever moral out of that you want.
Me, I'm gonna go find a new empty cup.
