Desire

What is desire?

Not simply hunger.
Not the body reaching toward another body.

Something older moves there.

People sit at tables full of food
and rise unsatisfied.

They hold each other in the dark
as though warmth might stop time
from continuing its quiet work.

Even knowledge fails them.

They build systems of explanation,
towers of careful thought,
and still the ladder ends
in cloud.

This is not an accident.

Something in us remembers
a condition we cannot name.

Call it wholeness.
Call it the moment before division.

The memory survives
in strange forms.

A sudden longing
while walking through a city street.

The feeling that the world
is almost speaking.

The sense that joy
has been misplaced somewhere
just beyond reach.

Religion once explained this.

It told the story of a garden,
a boundary crossed,
the long road afterward.

Whether the story is literal
is less important
than the fact it continues to feel true.

We live as though something essential
has been misplaced.

And so we try substitutions.

Power.
Possession.
Achievement.

None of them lasts long enough.

Desire returns
each time we think we have satisfied it.

Not as punishment.

As direction.

It points beyond the objects we pursue
toward something we cannot hold.

A fullness
that no single moment contains.

This is why longing persists.

It is not the enemy of peace.

It is the evidence
that we were not made
only for what we have.

And if we listen carefully
to that quiet dissatisfaction

we begin to suspect
that desire is not the wound.

It is the map.