Cry Out Your Want

Cry out your want.

I want my last will and testament to be filled with the people I love and to give everyone I love a weekend stay at the Hotel MacDonald with the fluffy robes and room service and the dog to pet in the lobby. I want to be unfathomable and mysterious. I want the perfect cardigan, so perfect Taylor Swift would be envious. I want more poetry. I want to “read poetry as carefully as menus in expensive restaurants.” (Adam Zagajewski)

I want to get back to Rome which AZ has described: “churches caked in dust, vermilion, ocher, sienna, and bordeaux, broad stains of cinnamon.” I want rigorous and inane and gossipy loopy conversations on long benches in the sun with friends in movie star glam sunglasses. I want more philosophy and less self-help. I want my work to be poetry. “Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity.” (Simone Weil) I want my life to be more literary which isn’t snobby or weird at all and I want to not care that some people will think so anyway. I want depth and breadth and art and wonder. I want more. I want more of the good stuff. The good good stuff.

I want to play Springsteen’s Dream Baby Dream loudly in my car. I want the light of Zurbaran paintings. I want pizza on a Friday night. I want holiness and surprise and I want the ordinary to be blissfully so. I want early Sunday morning photos sessions where I think about paintings by Edward Hopper. I want long video calls with our daughter where she draws while we chat. I want to take out my old easel some day and paint again. I want to draw my terrible drawings. I want my health. “I have arrived at the truth: only health is important.” (Moyra Davey). I want to sleep at night and have dreams that when I wake up I am compelled to write them down. I want to sleep. I want to breathe properly again. I want truth and I want to be absorbed by the details in paintings and by the lines of poetry that are tattooed on my skin, “hey, friends, courage, life is beautiful” (AZ) and “cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run” and “I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul.”

I want to read my library books before they’re due.

I want flowers and I want beautiful light that makes me scream out in joy like you would scream in the front row at a concert with your favourite band. I want you to have flowers, too, and screaming light. I want to “refrain from quoting authors I’ve only read secondhand.” (Moyra Davey). I want to take one really fucking holy wow photograph that makes everyone gasp. I want to write more. I want to understand and mull and watch funny sitcoms and laugh. I want waffles and maple syrup and cream of wheat with brown sugar. I want a single martini with a single olive at the end of a long day. I want to hear your witticisms. I want to want to be kinder again. I want to watch all the varieties of peonies grow in our garden this spring. I want to put out seeds for the birds and I want to grow some tall sunflowers. I want to sit on the bench on the island at Pyramid Lake again and look at that wild mountain reflection until it fills the inside of my mouth. I want to finish the new Marilynne Robinson novel Jack which I won’t allow myself to read now because I’m always too tired and I don’t want to come to it that way. I want to stay up late of a summer evening and drink peat mossy whisky in my back yard and look up at the stars and feel gloriously small. I want all my friends to come with me some night to a soft and grassy field and we all flop out on our backs and look up at the sky and the stars until we’re so drunk on them and at the end we say nothing nothing nothing to each other but love and then we walk home perfectly silent.

I want to watch Margeurite Duras’ Nathalie Granger and read C.L.’s A Breath of Life simultaneously. If I’m really telling you what I want, it’s a bowl of chocolate ice cream whenever I want one, at the snap of the fingers.

What I want might be completely different from what you want but it’s also exactly the same.

Let’s start there.

Your turn.