The Name of Desire

I’m going to tell you a story. Are you sitting down? Is your chair comfortable? If I start at the beginning, things will make too much sense. Do you mind if a story starts in the middle? Nothing ever happens in a sensible order anyway. A heart is never so rational. Desire is never an arrow that points straight.

Once upon a time, I held a boy’s hand. Most stories start this way, really, even if you don’t hold their hand until after you’ve made love. We think embers catch alight with gazes hitching across a dance floor, or over a bottle of rosé during the first date. We think it all begins with a swipe or a laugh or a kiss, but it doesn’t. The story starts when flesh meets flesh in the most innocent way. Desire can be peculiar and dishonest like that.

His skin is warm and alive as he pulls my hand into his, brings it to his mouth, smothers it with a gentle kiss, “I’m so proud of you,” he says.

The cars are thrumming on the main road and we are walking along the crossing. There is a shopping centre and a medical centre on the corner of the road, and there are fumes of smoke all around, with people who are busy going wherever they need to be, but above it all we are floating and he is looking at me, and my heart whispers notes of adoration. My desire is a tight coil that burrows under my flesh and sinews around my veins. I am not yet the damsel who has been saved by the prince, but I hope to be

The greatest stories build their backbones with truth. Here is a truth: holding a hand can simmer down your firing blaze to a gentle heat. Scientific studies (Crawford, 2018) have proven that the mere act of fingers meeting fingers, clasping, joining, has an analgesic effect on pain. Your brain, so timid and receptive and clever, is outwitted by the heart and its desire for the body to be held.

Another time, we are driving along the highway and he reaches for my hand. His body seems to fit so well in the driver’s seat. He is the captain of the ship and I am his woman even if he is not my man and he knows it. He speaks, while his palm is in my palm, and weaves me words that hint at his longing. He tells me that he cannot believe how fast I have swept him off his feet, and then he smiles at me. A mahogany grin full of promises. Earlier he found my pendulum tucked inside my wallet. I remember the sun bouncing from its edges as he swung it. He asks the pendulum a question but refuses to tell me what he asked. It is his ship, afterall. He relents that the answer would please me. He relents that he was not prepared for his desire to have him bending to me so quickly.

Love is your back to the ocean as a wave collides with the shore you stand on. Is that not love? To be caught off guard? To have no time to brace yourself for the imminent impact? Is love the impact? Is it two forces colliding, finally? Finally. Finally. Flesh meeting flesh, finally. Soul’s reaching for one another through time and space and parallel universes. It is the simmering, heated knowledge that in every realm this meeting exists.

Is it love even when it ends in one of those realms? It is, oh it is. What is love if not the hope we keep hidden next to our most gruesome fears?

Scientists cannot decide if we exist in a multiverse. Are we tuning in to only one frequency when there are, in fact, many frequencies that exist which are simply invisible to us? In this universe our hands met and our lips tasted and our eyes were hungry, but in another, do we never speak again after our first interaction? And what of bloodshed? And what of our hearts? How do they fare in every other realm?

I have googled it, you know. How do I contact myself in a parallel universe? The influx of search results indicate that it is not so strange a question. Some suggestions included finding a way to make yourself faster than the speed of light, or locating a black hole to jump into. My favourite, however, was to write a letter to your other self. The theory is that the simple act of wishing to connect to your other self tunes you into their frequency. Would they get your letter as deja vu? As a strange coincidence that makes them change their mind? Would we really wish to trickle into those dimensions? To make such an impact seems unholy. To make such an impact seems to sing of regret, here, in this realm, where each terrible thing has amounted to the bliss of many beautiful happenings.

Ok, let me backtrack for a moment and transport you to the beginning so that the story can have a shape. It is too soon to speak of regret and its weight.

Here’s how the story starts: the lights in the club smother me as the loud music washes over the crowd of patrons. The winter air is heavy in its sharpness, cutting into my cheeks. I’m working outside in the courtyard and he’s working at the bar. I notice him within minutes, and I can feel the silhouette of him on my peripheral all night. The prey and the hunter, shadowing each other between the bright lights. Like a sixth sense. Like a fated meeting. Like, thank god the last boy couldn’t desire me the way I needed him to. He smiles at me once but I think he’s just being polite. I resume my stance as the new employee and accept that he has already forgotten me by the time he makes the next drink.

The story continues because I do not forget him. Because my desire is a serpent devouring a mouse and I am ruthless in my pursuit. I pray he is not in love with someone else. I scour for crumbs until I learn his name. I am sure that in every universe we find each other. The story continues because I shield him from my ruthlessness, I curve the edges out so they’re soft and pretty. He thinks we met again by accident, but accidents so rarely hold a place in the lore of love.

On the first date, we lay side by side and expose our stories. I explain how my lovers have not always been fair to me, and he tells me of the ex who would not trust him. We talk about the universe and the corruption of circuses and the conspiracies of the cosmos and my heart with its desire is banging against my bones; the rattle is a raucous, it is a blade, it is a splintering. I tell him of my heartache, the termination of the pregnancy, the bruises that were the catalyst. He repeats back a similar story that happened to him, once, in which he was the man who had to talk his girlfriend out of a pregnancy. I recall shaking off a quiet knowing that whispered in my ears: he could never fathom how soft a woman is forced to be in her rage. When he tells me his story he is sure to position himself as a victim, too: a helpless man at the helm of a woman’s insanity. If I had a key to the door of a parallel universe, would I go to that moment? Would I grab my past self by the shoulders and tell her a glinting truth that this self is sure of? With my invisible voice I could tell her, “he is no victim.”

In Animal, Lisa Taddeo writes that “men are always putting their coats around my shoulders. They mark their territory that way. It’s better to freeze to death.” Here is a truth: holding a hand can simmer down your firing blaze to a gentle heat, and sometimes you should not be simmered down.

The number of women dying at the hands of men is a devastating avalanche. Women who lusted and laboured and tried to quiet their ruthlessness for the sake of safety. Because love is your back to the ocean as a wave collides with the shore you stand on, isn’t it? Is our choice not stripped once we plummet? Once they smile at us in praise as we bend and shrink and cry for them? Yes, those smiles seem to purr, that’s exactly how a woman should desire me. These deadly men lure and lumber and grunt and add to the avalanche but they could never be soft enough to write a letter to their alternate self. They could never have the foresight to wrap shackles around their own wrists so that their hands could never cause more damage.

Can I interrupt this tale and give you a spoiler? I want to tell you an important part of the ending. Love does not care where your heart rests, where his heart rests, only that it must have its moment in the sun, through your bones, fierce like a shank cutting through your ribcage. There is a timer and it clicks when he tells you how he’ll never forget you. This. The important moments wrapped in tiny claws. When he tells you how strange it is that we’ll never abandon the thought of one another, when we’re each separate, driving down that highway in our own cars and not holding each other’s hands, but living in the memory of what was.

Karakurt wrote that when a woman is leaving an abusive relationship, “a better indicator [to determine if she will leave] than frequency of physical violence may instead be the severity of emotional abuse.” (2013).