Longing

Rather hesitant… but maybe it’s fitting, given the topic.

Somewhere out there, I feel there’s a hand that’s reaching out to me, but I can’t quite hold it yet. There’s a house with the lights on, but no one’s inside. It’s like a song, a little perfect melody, that I’ve lost to time, but can’t quite remember losing. I desperately cling to these notions, this ache, this almost-ness that stretches me, not quite knowing why. Longing, holding on to something, hoping it won’t go away.

I don’t want to admit that it’s gone or never could’ve been there, but maybe that’s why I long for it. Desperation makes us cling to a vestige of some faraway thought, hoping, holding on, wishing it wouldn’t dissolve and slip away, right through the gaps between our fingers. A mirage dissolving into nothingness, out of reach, somewhere in the distance. But mirages tend to slip away, don’t they? Why, then do we long for things? Maybe it’s the comfort in knowing that those vestiges may have left reality, but not our hearts. Standing in a doorway, but not choosing to step in, for the fear of what may lie in leaving things behind. Looking at an old photo, browning at the edges, not because we want to remember, but rather because we couldn’t bear to forget.

Maybe those things weren’t real at all. We long for things that weren’t lost, but weren’t there. A life we could’ve lived, a love we could’ve loved, some version of us carved out of a vision but never into reality. These things we so long for, the ones that sometimes become our deepest beacons, are so often for things that weren’t ever real — and yet they shape us so, holding our hands, gently walking us across a bridge. But I don’t want to — maybe I find comfort in standing right here.

Longing sits down beside me. She’s silent. She doesn’t explain herself. She doesn’t have to. Perhaps I should cross that bridge, but I don’t want to. Time will drag me through anyways, and even though I accept my fate, I don’t want to. Questions cloud my mind, haunting me. What if longing isn’t a void? What if the things we long for make us who we are? Maybe it’s what keeps us searching, keeps us becoming. In the waiting, in the wanting, there’s a kind of purity. Maybe once we have what we dream about, it loses some of its magic — and we’re too afraid of losing that. What if it isn’t quite what we imagined? What if it isn’t quite as perfect as the ache made it feel?

Longing isn’t passive — it does something to us. It shapes us, pushes us, sometimes even rewrites who we are. Maybe we long for things so intensely that we become different people in the process. There’s some bittersweet beauty in longing, in hope, in belief — in a dream that never quite came true. Maybe it’s easier to live in the ache than to face the fact that something is truly gone, nary a care about what the universe says, even if to the contrary. It sharpens us and wears us down, hurts us and heals us, makes us dream and traps us in. Does it hurt more to hold on to it, or to let go?

It isn’t emptiness either. This longing, it stretches us, pushing us into some depth of emotion we haven’t touched before. Somewhere deep in that ocean, in that ache the emotion creates around us, maybe we find that we really are capable of what we felt for. Capable of love, of dreaming, of reaching for something beyond ourselves. Do the things we long for ever feel the same as it did in our hearts? Or was it longing for them that gave them their meaning, their soul?

It’s a universal feeling. We’ve all longed for something, somewhere, hoping that we might just snatch it, hoping it wouldn’t fade away when we reached out. And perhaps that’s what makes it special; makes it human. And maybe, somewhere in that in-between space, we’ll find what we’re searching for. Life itself seems to live in these moments that seem to be nestled in between others, waiting to be lived in. No matter what we long for — love, a home, a past self, a future self — sometimes longing is the closest we get to something. Maybe we never really find what we’re looking for. Maybe life is lived in the longing, in the spaces between having and losing, between reaching and grasping. And maybe that’s where we’re meant to be.

Longing aches because it reminds us of what could have been. But maybe that ache is proof we were meant to dream, to reach, to hope. And maybe, just maybe, the ache itself was the point all along.