longing for the real

-I want to be less self-conscious about my weight, to defeat the invidious comparisons I’m always making between my own size and that of other men.

-I want to be not so prone to addiction.

-I want to merge with someone, with everyone I meet and connect with on some deeper level (though I know it’s impossible), as if suggesting to myself the wish for an early death.

-I want to fall in love (but I’m not sure I’ll ever really know what that is, nor do I care to)

-I want to fast forward to a point in my life where hindsight is twenty-twenty. I’ve wanted this, I think, since I was about eleven. I hated being a child, and I still lie about my age to strangers, claiming to be at least two years older than I really am.

-I want to be sexually intimate with nearly everyone, as if to find in them what I find in myself, a void needing to be filled, to speak for the world in pairs and trios and every permutation in constant deferment of the end, relishing in process, reflection, physical contemplation opposed to mere ends.

-I want acknowledgment of the fact that confession is so, so cathartic, without judgment, without the backlash to the extent that my writing and thoughts are perceived as too personal or effusive. Are we not all exposing ourselves in veiled form all the time, wishing that someone would understand us on some fundamental level, a level we ourselves don’t really understand beyond acknowledgment from others?

-I want to be less self-conscious, to the extent that I’m not compelled to spill my guts in this fashion (but I’ll keep going).

-I want to be able to have a political conversation with someone without feeling like an aberration, or without coming to an agreement on a blanket indictment of “the system.”

-I want so badly to tell everyone how much my every thought is informed by death, without coming across as morbid or weird or depressed or alone (though I’m a bit of all of these things)

-I want to stop using the internet altogether, because as much as I try to reconcile myself to the reality of change, I hate it; I hate how much I use it, how dependent on it I, and everyone around me is, and how it mediates reality (despite the claims by my more overtly post-modern friends that everything is “always already” mediated).

-I want to read without ever having to take notes.

-I want to kiss without ever having to say goodbye.

-I want to swim in places without water: on the couch, on the floor, in my bed.

-I want to tell certain people all about myself…really.

But most of all I want not to want these wants; I want words to do less than they do; I want to do away with the fact of my being human (I don’t want to commit suicide). But I want less self-consciousness, less humanity, and more of those things that mitigate the longing that is the human condition itself. This is the funny thing about blogging: we want so badly to say all of this (or something to this effect), because no one else will listen except, paradoxically, ourselves. We want so badly to tell and listen to our own stories because we’re so deprived of other outlets for them, so unsure about whether they might matter, so disillusioned with our work-a-day lives and marriages that we can’t understand the “place of reach” that actually informs our deeds and our words, a place of anxiety and desire for connection.

“Can you hear me…anyone,” I think with every blog I read. “Do I matter…am I real…?” One could argue that culture is a perpetual struggle to prove to ourselves our own reality, our own existence. But blogging seems to me a more desperate attempt to deal with the “truth of skepticism.” That is, it’s a way in which we can connect on a level that reminds us of another dimension, only imagined as escape. It’s not a remembrance of things past, a wistful longing of something that once was through digital recapitulation, but rather a frantic, collective, testament to the ephemerality of our longing itself, a way of reaching out in whatever way we can so as to ask questions, arguably the questions: “Can you hear me? Do I make sense? Do you relate? Do you know what I mean? Have you felt this way before? Have you thought about your own funeral? How often? Do you long for something that can’t exist?

-I want to be more than human.

-Erik Hmiel