10 a.m. in the Publix parking lot. South Florida sun already heavy against my skin, swirling in little eddies inside elbows, collarbones, the concave of my throat. Coursing along cracked pavement and searing the shimmering hoods of cars. No choice, no resistance now. Surrender to this daydream. The soft crush of a weighted blanket. The heel of a hand on the small of my back. The moment just before you touch me, before that space between opens, yields.

I’ve come to buy raspberries, an avocado, seeded bread, boxed wine. Staples for my current isolation: here, as far as one can get from Seattle on the jagged diagonal of this country, to cure myself of things I cannot have and should not want.

Night: driving fast from Miller’s Alehouse on wide, empty, palm-strung Delray Beach roads, blasting Iron Maiden’s “Wasted Years.” Lightning zagging the black, early-June sky in the distance like it’s singing along. Windows open, 84 degrees. The air is always electric here even when quiet, ready to crack open. And I, just a week into this two-and-a-half-month retreat,  sizzling with voltage too.

I can feel big things alone. Things that flare, trace, spark, burn up everything in sight. Nothing to contain or confine or redirect. I can feel anything I want. 

I want.

—

What if we said it’s good to want and meant it truly? asks Carmen. She’s an embodiment educator, a bubbly woman in Grape Crush-colored lipstick that matches her eyeglass frames, dark hair coiled in loose buns atop her head, and she’s riffing on Instagram Live about how we can get what we want.

The gist: that many of us have forgotten how to access or know or name what we genuinely want. That we may have limiting beliefs about what we’re allowed to want due to conditioning, scarcity, oppression, or trauma. That we must reclaim our wants—as a core condition of reclaiming our power and ourselves.

I want an Oompa Loompa! I want to shout, here at my desk with only my pup, Dov Bear, curled near my feet in a pool of late afternoon sun. I want a fucking pony! Always the rabble-rouser, the incendiary, even when I want to believe. A strategy, I admit, to protect myself from the tender earnestness of my own wants.

But what if the things I want are things I can’t have? Or things that aren’t good for me? What if the things I want leave me rag-dolled and red-handed, retrograde on other people’s porches as dawn breaks, fumbling for words and cigarettes, heart smeared bright across my ribs? What if the things I want send me running toward and away, toward and away, like a wind-up berserk, toward and away from myself, too? What if the things I want land me in borrowed rooms at makeshift desks beside tiny windows where it’s always raining? Land me back in old selves I thought I’d escaped or retired? Land me in enemy territory in my own mind on otherwise perfect, rose-garden Sundays? Land me wanting more and more?

What if I want things more when I can’t have them—or shouldn’t have them? What if the things I want are substitutes for things I don’t know how to ask for—or that I’m afraid to ask for?

How am I ever to trust my own big, muddled, messy, imploring wants?

To marinate in desire, to yearn, to long for, to anticipate… that’s where we get the dopamine cascades, Carmen is continuing. Not from the getting what we want. From the wanting.

And yes, of course: sometimes wanting, itself, is enough. Sometimes it’s the point. That fertile unearthing of want, welcoming it into the light, touching its fledgling bud and stamen. Whispering: I see you. Whispering: I planted you. Whispering, without disdain and even as I abstain: it’s good to want. Otherwise, buried wants are notorious for clawing their ways up from the mud pits of imagination, blue-lipped and raptor-eyed, ready for takedown.

—

Exercise: What I Want

Purpose: To practice perceiving and articulating your felt, somatic sense of want.

Instructions: Close your eyes, settle, breathe. Allow your want, your desire, to rumble up from within. Pressure. Hunger. Interoception. No one is telling you what you should want. It doesn’t matter if it’s “good” or “bad.” It doesn’t matter if you think it’s possible. Give yourself permission to value whatever arises, without judgment or qualification. What do you want?

1. I want you to listen without saying a word while I whisper all the things I want. You don’t have to like them. You don’t have to do them. Just listen.

2. I want an amusement park ride called The Dopamine Cascades.

3. I want to run in the grass in the sun with my dog, bare feet trampling the blades and damp dirt, darting and whooping like wild things.

4. I want to fuck my therapist.

5. I want your fingertips on my neck, my pulse. Violet veins, hydrangea, steady now, shooting stars. Harder.

—

Florida—

This is a love letter to you, also. You’ve been my respite, my net.

Since my childhood, when my grandparents and other family elders made the East Coast exodus south to your summerland of swimming pools and golf courses and bagel shops and flea markets. And later, when my parents became snow-birds themselves and I ensconced myself with them from my home in Seattle for extended visits as my marriage cracked and imploded.

We were already attached, Florida; you were already imprinted as refuge. So, several years ago, when my divorce finalized and the world was unfurling from its COVID-contraction, I packed some clothes and books and my pup into my car, shoved everything else into storage, and drove that long diagonal to you. Didn’t stop until North Beach, Miami—far from anyone I knew or had ever been—and for a year I wrote and walked the shore at dusk. Barefoot, salty swell of the Atlantic, families blasting Latin music out of boom boxes planted in the warm sand. And the abandoned, half-wrecked Deauville Hotel looming above, clumps of tangled wire and torn concrete like an old queen with her mouth gashed in.

—

You did it. You caught me. Your soft landing, Florida, your sweltering embrace. Your callback to myself amidst exile from all those other clamoring or broken or frozen or runaway versions of self.

Since then, I’ve been hopping coasts. Toward and away, toward and away. I want Seattle. So much of my life, my loves, imprinted on its geography. And also, it’s strewn with ghosts—skulking in city alleys, soft palms pressed to brick walls like late-night penitents, or bending from bedroom windows of one former home or another, catch me, catch me, catch me, please.

Is it possible to relapse on a city? My last stint in Seattle, the winter and spring before this summer retreat, this exit hatch back to you, felt that way. Like collecting up all those stowaway ghosts and throwing them a big party. One of those old school ragers where it’s not tomorrow until you sleep—and only cowards sleep. I’ll spare you the details, Florida. You don’t need to know everything about my other loves.

Except: I did fall in love. At least I thought I did—love and limerence, genuine want and the addict’s ache, are tricky bastards. Easier to define, to parse, in solid, sober words like these, than to truly distinguish within oneself. Especially when it feels so good. Especially when you want to believe. Especially when you’re still seeking something, or someone, to rescue you from yourself.

I know you want to know who. Well, I’m not going to tell you. It’s still too raw. Just know it was a person—flesh, bone, ink, palm full of smooth stones, warm grip on my upper arm that lingers, even now. A person, for the first time since my divorce. And know it ended badly. Left me pretty shredded, still. Even though, funny thing is, the veil lifted almost immediately. I didn’t know that I even wanted this new lover anymore, despite an insidious yearning that wouldn’t retreat. I just wanted.

So here I am, Florida. Back in your arms. Probing want from every angle. So I can understand. So I can cure myself.

So I can trust myself to leave you, once again.

—

From “Dopamine: The Currency of Desire” in Scientific American:

Instead of producing pleasure, dopamine seemed to drive desire. Desire itself can be enjoyable in small doses—but in the long run, if it is not satisfied, it is just the opposite. Eventually [the researchers] realized that the pleasure involved in seeking a reward and that of actually obtaining it must be distinct. They labeled the drive that dopamine seemed to induce as “wanting” and called the joy of being satiated, which did not seem to be connected with dopamine, “liking.”

The Dopamine Cascades sounds much more fun than The Satiation Station.

—

Maybe I want to take back my earlier statement about things I should not want. Maybe placing wants in that category only heightens their power. Buries them in that irresistible soil of inevitability. Humid and ripe.

Transgression has always been one of the hottest numbers at the sticky sideshow of want. Decked out in rose petals, plastic pearls, drugstore perfume. Batting coy eyes behind barely cracked doors, beckoning slow.

Transgression’s crackly megaphone: should. Her producer and promoter: should. Her loyal wingman: should. Her ruby-hued, champagne goggles: should.

Try telling me I shouldn’t. Go ahead, try.

—

What do you miss the most? I ask my students in a writing workshop for senior citizens I’m teaching at a Palm Beach County community center. What do you want back, if you could have anything?

They’re mostly women, a few men, some pushing one hundred years old and hunched around a long table in a sunny room strewn with arts and crafts projects, colorful crepe paper cut-outs, bins of paint and plastic scissors. They list five yearnings each. Five wants scrawled in slow, delicate cursive on lined notebook pages, stopping to stare out windows or glance at each other. They pass their pages to me to be compiled into a composite poem.

The warmth and love as my husband would wrap his arms around me with a secure hug, writes one.

A good set of knockers. To make a man’s eyes go ga-ga, writes another.

But the one that floors me, from a gentle, great grandma in her mid-nineties who speaks very softly when she speaks at all:

I miss the wind in my face when I speed. I love speed.

—

My ritual midnight walk with my pup, Dov Bear, in this sleepy Delray Beach golf course community where I’m borrowing a room for the summer. Round we go, the fake pond glistening with streaks of streetlight. We greet the night guard ducks with saucer side-eyes, the possibly poisonous toads, the lizards that cling to lampposts like their own private moons. It’s so simple and quiet here.

The same two or three windows are always lit at this hour, and we peer like spies. Same oldsters in their same nightshirts or gowns, slumped on same couches to the din and glow of TV shows. They never notice us.

One I see almost every night: always in his white leather chair, bare feet upon cool, white tile floor. Always wearing a loose tank top, alternating between red, white, and very occasionally black. Arms that look like they used to be toned. Wispy, longish silver hair that gives him an almost ethereal, elf-king air. Alone in his late-night liturgy of shows. Staring, with near expressionless fixation, it seems, right through the television, through the adjoining unit where someone else slumbers, through the nearby road where cars blaze by against the dark, through the rumbling, sleepless shore of the Atlantic just a few miles east, all the way through to some other time, some past or future no one else can see.

Do we stop living when we stop wanting?

—

6. I want cold wine, tender orange mango, lips sugared with bourbon.

7. I want to believe you when you say I want to keep you safe or I’ll be here when you land, always.

8. I want to believe myself when I tell myself those things.

9. I want a home that will always be there, waiting to welcome me home; that collects and keeps the stuff and scents and stories of a life; that you can walk past outside on a cold night and glimpse, through wide windows, the muted glow of people laughing around a wooden table, passing soup, tearing crusty bread with their hands.

10. I want all my humid daydreams.

—

I like the firm sledgehammer of should even though I know it’s out of fashion, deemed unhelpful, dogmatic, whitewasher of wants. Maybe I want to keep my should, after all. Maybe I want to kneel before my personal should and feel its censorious glare. Tremble, burn. Lick its armor. Smirk at it and whisper, You can’t tell me what to do.

Louder, bitch, Should commands. I can’t hear you.

Maybe I want to do it anyway.

—

The cool white counter of the master bath, two square sinks, bright, antiseptic, bare. Sarah paints my lips, thick layers of firetruck red that clot in the corners of my mouth and feather, unruly, along the edges. Kohl-rims my eyes, smudged black and smoke. Feeds me more drugs, or maybe I feed them to myself.

It’s seven years ago and we’re in the final home my ex-husband and I shared in Seattle: a modern palace of massive, airy rooms and custom, steel-forged furniture and oversized art meant to stave off the end. And this, our anniversary photoshoot with Sarah, a rockstar photographer we recently met, also meant to stave off the end. But now it’s the third night of what was supposed to take a day and, of course, the three of us have already fucked in all the various incarnations, and imbibed a variety pack of potions, and roamed Seattle’s Volunteer Park water tower at 2 a.m., posed in fishnets and furs against metal grate doors, wrote and filmed a few music videos involving bouncy donkeys and Barbies and dildos, passed out, did it all over again, photographed the whole ordeal, etc., etc.

And the thing is: I like Sarah, already. So I’m trying not to let her see the cracks. The deep crevasses everywhere in this house where my wants have already broken loose, crumbled and slid. The way he can empty me, take all my air, my wants, with a glance. The way his eyes roll with should. The way he shows this off to her with tiny arrows, casual derisions, shot my way—he likes her, too. Wants her to see this. The way I’ve learned to replace wanting with the less risky being wanted. How expert I’ve become at this, at shapeshifting into everyone else’s fantasies.

But she’s smart. She sees. Her job, her art, is seeing.

Sarah dresses me: a yellow bikini top with delicate frills. A yellow lace thong. Black peep-toe heels. My armpits hot, ripe, sweat on my thighs. That point in a weekend like this where nothing is pretty or prudent anymore and you don’t care, can’t care.

Get in the shower, she says.

I tread in, wobbling on the charcoal-tiled floor in my stilettos. The stall itself a small room, glass-enclosed, huge chrome showerhead that mists and massages, makes its own weather, you could wash—or slaughter—a large mammal in here.

In the corner. Yes. Lean, bend. Click. Click. Angles. Give me fucking angles. Angles and angels. Arms like a dying bird. Click. Stop smiling. Click. Click. Click. Fucking stop. Get your hands out of your hair. Click. Don’t give a fuck. Show me you don’t give a fuck. Click. Click. Yes. Click. Good girl. Click.

I bend against the cool tile, limbs splayed akimbo, everything just a little bit wrong. Trying not to try. Trying to let go.

I don’t usually let anyone tell me what to do like this, I bluster. As if I need to assert this, let her know.

Turn on the water, she says. Click. Take off your clothes. Click. Click. Yes. Now, get in.

Beneath the warm spray it’s another world, a rushing womb. No more clicks. Nothing but me and her voice. I think she’s still shooting, but I don’t know. 

Who the fuck are you? / What do you want? / Huh? What are you going to do? / Why are you taking this? / DO something! / FEEL something! / Fuck, come on. / Look at me! / WHAT DO YOU WANT?

I think I might be crying, sobbing, but I don’t know. I’m in the waterfall, I’m inside my own tears. There’s nothing, nothing, nothing. Just me, and her voice, and everything that’s been crammed and jammed and swallowed inside surging out my eye sockets, my lips, my ears, my cunt, my ass, my glands—hard, hot torrents.

You’re nothing. / You’re no one. / How does that feel? / Tell me how that feels! / What do you want? / What do you want? / What do you want? / WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO FUCKING DO ABOUT IT?

The truth: I don’t even know if this is what she says. This is what I hear.

The pictures are hard to look at:

I’m more naked than I’ve ever seen myself. Hair slicked wet and dark, W-sitting on the shower floor like a child, belly, breasts, hairless pink of my vulva, face mottled with water and makeup—melting mid-stream—like it’s flooding from inside me, seeping out my skin and pores. Staring wide-eyed, head-on, inside-out. At myself.

It’s excruciating.

It’s such a relief.

—

A few years later—and a few weeks after I file for divorce, Sarah and I will huddle outside a dwindling Seattle party at 6 a.m., passing a warm bottle of wine and riding the comedown of some other weekend. And she’ll confess she’s just like me. Wanting to lay her wants belly up, soft animal guts, blood and marrow and spit and all. But holding her real desires close like aces, instead. Both of us so expert in bluster and bravado. Because wanting leaves you vulnerable. Easy, too easy, to capture, take, vanquish, discard.

Desirelessness, we knew, was a kind of power. But what we wanted, more than anything, was to relinquish that power. To not need that power. For it to be safe to want.

—

11. I want to know how it feels to be that swan, sinking her long neck into and out of the still water of the fake pond.

12. I want to know what she does when the hard rains, the lightning, come.

13. I want to use you as my muse—in a fierce way. A taking way. Make you draw forth my words like a blue bruise.

14. I want to feel safe.

15. I want to bury my nose in Dov Bear’s fur: rain-soaked wood, almond skin, mud, dark bread. Home.

—

12:21 a.m., mid-July, Florida. Dov Bear and I race, whooping, across the wet grasses toward the fake pond. The oily algae swirls atop the thick, black surface of the water. The hollow drumbeat of toads. The crickets.

A single duck is perched squat, watching, on the concrete island at the pond’s center that erupts into a cascading fountain by day.

Dov yanks her leash with sudden urgency toward a mound of grass. A fat spotted toad!

No licking poisonous toads! I yell, tugging her away as she strains with all her mighty thirteen pounds toward her bulbous new friend-prey.

No! No! No! I insist, scooping her into my arms. It’s because I love you, I say. It’s so we can keep you alive, I say. Not everything you want is good for you. I know you can’t understand this. I barely understand this. But...

—

Florida—

It’s early August now. Breeze like fever-breath, palms fluttering over the deserted golf course, a couple stick-legged egrets picking their way across the grasses, lazy like they have all day. And they do, they do. Almost too easy here.

Last month, they were trying to trap a gator that had been hiding out in a swampy canal bordering this community for weeks. Huge, scaly, beasty dude. Chilling on the hinterlands of paradise and snacking on its pretty, sun-drunk show-birds like Cheetos. He eluded the trapper and even escaped his nets several times before they finally got him. I was rooting for him, even as I listened for rustlings in the leaves, lifted Dov into my arms as we approached dense thickets near dusk. I couldn’t help but cheer on the gator. He knew exactly what he wanted.

You’ve been good to me, Florida. Just what I needed, as always. Maybe you’re my Satiation Station, the serotonin to my dopamine. I mean that with love.

I’m a little sad to tell you I’m leaving, finally. Hitting the road next week for Seattle. I know you understand. I’m ready. No, I haven’t cured myself of wanting—but I think I was wrong about that being the goal, about the nature of my affliction.

Remember that soil where I plant my wants? That special dirt of daydreams and raptors?

Maybe the problem was never wanting. It was planting my wants in too-small plots. Becoming their servant, their humble harvester, instead of their gardener.

Maybe it is always good to want.

Maybe I need to want bigger. To want more.

—

16. I want.

17. I want.

18. I want.

19. I want.

20. I am alive and I want!

—

Goodbye, neon golf balls that glow in tall grasses like miniature suns.

Goodbye, geckos who tumble from trees and geckos who scurry across steaming sidewalks and geckos who cling to white stucco walls with tiny, sticky feet while Dov and I whoop and woof and chase them.

Goodbye, swan queen and king who glide the black surface of the fake pond at midnight. Who lounge on the banks late-morning, plucking feathers from each other’s coats.

Who could forget you, possibly poisonous toads? Your night guard at the pond’s perimeter. Dov’s futile attempts to lick you.

Goodbye, Miller’s Alehouse. My ritual Sunday evenings alone with a burger at the outside bar top; and driving home late, all the windows down and thick Florida night rushing in and saying thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Goodbye fever-breath afternoons. Goodbye dusks you can drink like lemonade. Goodbye solitude that, it turns out, is pretty sublime. Quiet so thick I could hear myself. Not just my words, my animal rumblings. All my big, inextinguishable wants.

Goodbye, Florida.

Onward.

—END —