desire

lately i find i check my phone once every two minutes. my twitter screen time is atrocious. in late-night moments of frustration and unending tension in the pit of my stomach, i tell my friends that i need to delete it. the next morning, it replaces getting out of bed as my first task of the day. i am reminded constantly on the platform that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives, so why am i spending my life swiping up to see if you’ve taken time out of yours to shout something into the void?

i fancy myself a materialist, a principled marxist, though in times like these i always struggle to find a material explanation for my behavior. perhaps it is that, for the first time in three years, i have no romance to take for granted. maybe it’s a mixture of the chasm of hormones; the wilting, unexplored sexuality of my late teens resurfacing after being smothered with monogamy and domesticity. maybe there is something about you that i wish to explore, and maybe this will fade as i come to know you as i’d like to. maybe my idea of you is an attempt by my mind to actualize the endlessly abstract carving i feel at the base of my abdomen. maybe it is ignited by the dread i start and end my day with, and maybe this is my way of finding or constructing beauty in a world that i so often fail to see any beauty in.

what property does desire have that makes it so enveloping? what about desire and its grasp on me lulls me to waste my life away waiting for a speech bubble to appear and dissipate on this arduous screen? i am not being driven mad, at least i don’t think i am, but why can’t i help but compromise what little dignity i have for this? do i even have the right to say i do it for you?

yesterday a friend told me that my worry about you is disproportionate to my “ability to bag”. i replied with a vague “that doesn’t matter,” partly because i was high and partly to save face. what i really meant is that all the humans in the world could be at my doorstep begging for me, humans which represent the pinnacle of beauty and grace, yet i would still find myself preoccupied with what you think of me. the god of love herself could profess her insatiable hunger for me, and i would still be refreshing twitter and listening intently to the song you mentioned to me once at a party.

desire makes us pathetic creatures. it deteriorates our sensibilities, makes us stupid, makes us flustered, humiliates us. for now i am trying not to mind. i can learn to live with it, if only i’d heed the three-hour time limit i placed on that stupid fucking app.