SaraI was younger once, or at least I wore the skin of the young — a borrowed cloak stitched from the threads of longing. Desire — if that is its true name — was then a quiet companion. It followed without demands, humming a melody older than love, steadier than faith. Long before I could give shape to its machinery, before I had words or silence for it, I lived inside the pulse of its absence: a hollow tuned to the pitch of prayer.
Desire is born in the mirror.
The first time I caught sight of myself, not as flesh but as image, something shifted. A line, thin as breath, stretched across the glass, invisible but irrevocable. In that reflection, I mistook the shimmer for truth, the unity for wholeness. Thus began the slow unfolding of distance, the gentle exile that seeded every song.
I
Desire moves deeper than the hungers of the body. It borrows the shape of a hand on a hip, a mouth at the hollow of a throat, yet it slips past the skin. It slips even past the soul.
It does not ask for what can be held. It leans into what remains unreachable — the tender gap between presence and possibility. We seek not the object but the ache that it promises to soothe. And even when the hands are full, something quiet continues to call.
Desire is what endures when need has been answered, a murmur woven into the bones.
II
Once, crossing a border town swallowed by dust, I sat in a diner where the coffee was bitter and the mirrors were scratched by time. Behind the counter, my reflection flickered — less a man, more the outline of one. It struck me that we do not live inside the flesh, but in its shadows.
We fall for the image, the glimmer that speaks of a unity no hand can ever quite hold. We move toward it because it gestures — gently, endlessly — toward a memory of wholeness we never possessed. Desire is the echo of that memory.
III
I have known women whose beauty could steady a trembling heart. I have loved them as one loves the horizon at dusk — not to reach it, but to be illuminated by its nearness. And still, the longing grew.
Desire feeds not on bodies or names, but on the space they open — the almost, the nearly, the never-quite. It is not the lover we seek, but the silent promise that lingers in their absence.
IV
The world was once unspoken, and in that silence was fullness. Language gave names, drew borders. With every word, the horizon receded.
Before names, there was no divide. Afterward, everything was both closer and farther away. To speak is to separate — softly, inevitably. To desire is to move toward that first silence, not to return, but to remember.
V
There is a bar in a forgotten city where men gather over cracked tables to exchange old songs. I sat there once, a stranger among strangers. And if you listened carefully, beneath their laughter and arguments, you could hear it — the small, persistent hymn of what was left unsaid.
Desire arranges itself with quiet precision, a grammar not of possession but of approach. What we reach for is always moving, just beyond our grasp. It is the reaching, not the having, that composes the music.
Desire is the discipline of the almost.
VI
Imagine three figures at the edge of a field at dusk: one holding a map, one studying their reflection in a river, one standing still with eyes closed, listening.
The first carries the law — the rituals, the familiar paths. The second carries the dream of completion — the image in the water that promises unity. The third leans into the dark — not blind, but open.
Most live by the map. Some chase the reflection. But the rare few wait in the open field, where the wind tells no lies and the stars speak only in their own tongues.
Desire belongs to the third — the one who waits, not for fulfillment, but for the beauty of the waiting itself.
VII
I have carried many names — son, lover, poet, traveler — but none fit like that of a pilgrim. Desire is the pilgrimage without destination, a path that unfolds only as it is walked.
Each gesture, each love, each song is less a conquest than a translation — a faithful, clumsy attempt to give form to the formless. The beauty lies not in arrival, but in the steps taken in reverence.
Desire remains because it listens more than it demands.
VIII
Once, I stood at the edge of a desert, watching the horizon waver between gold and fire. It seemed endless. It seemed close enough to touch. I thought: this is what longing looks like when it stands still.
Not a goal, not a conquest — a flame that lights the way simply by burning.
It is not satisfaction we seek. It is the quiet astonishment of reaching out, again and again, even when the hand returns empty.
IX
There is a law older than any scripture, a breath that shaped the first syllables spoken into the dust. It hums beneath every prohibition, not to punish, but to remind.
What we are given is separation — not as cruelty, but as invitation. The space between what is and what could be is not a wound, but a cradle.
Desire rises from this space — not broken, but endlessly unfolding.
X
I have chased the outline of something nameless. I have written songs to map its territory, whispered prayers into the silence it leaves behind. I have touched hands that disappeared like mist at dawn.
Desire has not betrayed me. It has been a quiet companion, loyal to the end.
XI
Desire is not a curse to be undone, nor a flaw to be mended. It is a thread, woven through the body of the world, drawing us not toward possession, but toward presence.
To desire is to remain tender in a world that hardens. To move without conquering. To love without owning.
We become ourselves not in what we hold, but in what we reach toward.
XII
There is a holiness in longing, a sacredness in the journey with no arrival. We are born reaching. We live listening. We leave without having captured the music — but having been shaped by it.
And perhaps that is enough.
XIII
Desire is the thread that pulls us forward, even when the night is long and the road vanishes beneath the feet. It is the breath that steadies the hand, the silence that sharpens the song.
It is not lack but the tender ache of belonging to what is larger than ourselves. It is the fire that burns gently, endlessly, through the dark.
And if there is grace, it is not in fulfillment, but in the beauty of the reaching.
