The Prison Of Wanting
What a pathetic state to be in, to want someone. To need someone. To need warmth. To need love. I write love as though I am writing a foreign word, a foreign curse, like a language I am trying to learn while knowing I can never become fluent in it.
To constantly need someone to understand you is its own kind of prison, and I would not wish it upon my worst enemy.
We all want someone to dig deeper into who we are, to learn about us, to know us better than we could ever tell them ourselves. We will never be able to confess everything about ourselves. We are too reserved for that, too self-conscious. So we want someone to figure it out, to notice the things we leave unsaid, to lead us down the path where confessions happen naturally.
We yearn for the kind of companionship where conversations do not have to be forced. They flow like a river that has burst its banks. The kind of conversations that survive the night and witness the morning. Those are the best conversations because morning feels different. You do not feel tired at the end of the night. You feel alive because, for the first time in a long while, you have shared something with someone, and you know it has changed you completely.
The person who ends the conversation in the morning is very different from the one who started it the previous night. We all yearn for such companionship. That is why so many people are willing to sacrifice morality, ethics, and even the stability of their own lives. It is so intoxicating that people are willing to go to extraordinary lengths just to experience it.
To have someone understand you is addictive, but the need is not born of addiction. It is born of absence. We have all felt the void within ourselves that reminds us how miserable we have become, yet we cannot express it to anyone. We have become so desperate for warmth that we clutch at even its faintest semblance with both hands.
If that is not a prison, I do not know what is. There is no bail from that prison. If there were, if there were even a chance of being acquitted, I would have been the first to walk out. The only escape is numbness, but that comes with its own cost. Numbness frees you from longing, but it also steals your capacity to feel joy. We have all chained ourselves to a hope that may never arrive because, despite everything, hope is easier to bear than emptiness.
It is a pathetic state to be in when you have no one who can look you in the eye and say, "You are lying." It is a beautiful state to be in when you have someone with whom words are unnecessary, when your presence alone is enough. Consider yourself fortunate if you have found that. The rest of us are still trying to escape that prison.