The Yearning

If you are as normal, as healthy and well-adjusted as I fear you may be, Dear Reader, the idea of infecting someone will naturally never have occurred to you.

How about if I said "influencing people"? You know, the Dale Carnegie thing? Ever wanted to do that? (It's not exactly the same thing, but it's close.)

No, of course you never "wanted to" influence anyone. You do it all the time, regardless. You communicate with others, and in your imagination at least, you commune. You share stuff. Perhaps there is a Special Person you commune with, y'know, specially. Assuming you live in the First World, that is (it may surprise you to learn that here in the Third World, the romantic concept of the Special Person never really caught on. Romance needs Hollywood to keep it alive, and Hollywood is almost off the dial in some places).

If this is you, then the idea that someone may have gone through their entire life, all fifty-five years of it, without communing with anyone, wanting to but being unable to, will strike you as obscene, or impossible, or both.

Well, that person is me. This is the background to everything else, so it's what has to go into the test tube first. This yearning. The one thing that getting old, and approaching death, hasn't succeeded in quieting, or solving.

What do I mean by communing? Can I be clearer, please?

It's kind of a complicated knot of concepts, but I'll try. As a first approximation, try this: the Yearning I speak of is for someone who understands, accepts and does not judge you, despite knowing all there is to know. And as a bonus (OK, this is really pushing it), who having achieved this extraordinary feat, gives you a hug.

Nothing else, just a hug.

Who looks into your eyes, from inches away. and smiles, and says quietly "I know". And who is not lying when she says it.

I am tempted to go further and say that, in order not to be lying when she says it, she has to have lived certain things. Or perhaps to have not lived other things. Sorry. You may have a fine mind, and be very empathetic and all, but understanding people like me (are there people like me?) requires certain, well, sacrifices. Things I wouldn't wish on anyone, which is why the test-tube shortcut to understanding holds such fatal attraction.

OK, so you want someone, and you're picky about gender. Join the fucking human race. Geez.

You're right of course: everybody wants somebody. Or did once, and then found the someone, murmured "sorted", and advanced up to the next level of Maslow's Pyramid. Fine.

It feels kind of selfish to insist on the various variables, all of them squalid, which make my style of wanting different from other styles. More embarrassing, more howling and windswept and lonely. But it's what there is. You can paint over it with other colours, as I will try to, but the background has to be there.

It's how you get to be me. No obligation, naturally.