—Never a serious wish—none of the momentum that must attend the real thing, like when window shopping quickens into an urgent need—but it was more than a daydream. Or maybe it was a kind of daydream, the pleasurable anticipation of pleasure, never quite materialising in the mind's eye. The same organ we use to navigate familiar streets also monitors the roadworks between desire and its destination, and detecting a shortcut makes the organ hard. It defies intuition that relief from burden could be equivalent to acquiring something, but sometimes it must be, or why would we pay for nursing homes?
—It's bygone anyway. To carry such a burden something needs to matter enough that dropping it is harder than dying. Think of it this way: the only difference between a dream and a daydream is vividity. Once I dreamt I was a teacher defending myself against two black power militants from the 1970s, and the fight reloaded three times before I worked out how to choreograph a win. You object that the real difference between a dream and a daydream is you would never daydream about that, but look—if you imagine you were that teacher, and in this circumstance you were right and they were wrong, and you were protecting your other students so that any applause or subsequent condemnation would have been incidental to the baseline ethics of it all, then that's nine tenths of a daydream. The missing fraction is desire, which is somehow supplied by the chemistry of sleep and in the morning flushes from your body like come.
—That's why sex is easier when you have to do it. Here is a woman from the internet, who experienced a Pauline conversion regarding the cups her husband left near the sink. She realised this was not a volley of weaponised incompetence but rational economic behaviour. She was wrong. The first time I was forced to grow up I saw I would never receive the love I wanted, so I struck the primer with a lower cuspid. After this, sex became a favour superposed with a duty, and each face forgave the other when I came too early, or lied that my partners were attractive, or never learned how to properly use my tongue. Then, in a rare window where both of us were single, my long-forsaken love returned, and to my greater surprise it was exactly what I wanted. What I could not anticipate was the vertigo. I trained in high gravity, but they deployed me into low orbit with six degrees of freedom, so I restrict myself to the horizontal plane to avoid jeopardising my mission.
—Most of us live out our lives never knowing our problems could have been so peaceful. How many Wentworths never visit Kellynch Hall? What constellations must eclipse each other before the transpirance of such a miracle? If you hadn't found your other hemisphere you'd be like the rest of us, skittering from failure to failure, scaffolding your heart with reason to hide from the inhuman fact that love exists but all you would ever know was compromise. We are jigsaw pieces forced together with a hammer. Imagine telling a person that the hole they almost fill was cut to someone else's shape. Imagine telling that to anyone.
—You misunderstand. We cut the holes ourselves when we like how the pieces look together. Nobody cares how we came to enjoy the contrast, and none of us have lost our chance. It is the absence of love that prepares us for its arrival. We earn what we get by becoming the kinds of people who deserve it. That's what the scaffolding is for: without its support our hearts deform to primordial slime. Isn't it better to love someone for the labour of their self-construction, and to feel yourself worth its value, than to live afraid of the sunlight between you?
—None of you—no. We are all loved in every way, and that's the curse. The fantasy, the missing limb, the idiot tautology of being—nothing is worth the mortification. Nothing justifies the awkward photograph or the voicemail message, and none of you can repay me for mounting myself on this armature. I am glad I lost the power to daydream. If I had dreamt more I would be a statue in the park with blind, blank eyes, living time in reverse. All value is produced by the death and birth of every fraction of a moment. All energy is generated in that turbine, and the very best we can do is feed ourselves to its blades and learn what it is to be infinite. But the only path there is to pass beyond dream and wish, and I cannot bring my flickering self to will that upon any of you.
—Haha
Totally lived this.