Walking down Exposition Boulevard. It is nighttime and it must be COVID-time, because my friend and old roommate is step by step with me. My roommate’s feet land balls first, while I walk with no real form. I think about the synchrony that I am studying (or perhaps coming close to study) around this time.
This is the first conversation that I have ever had about desire. How powerful saying “I want” can be. In that moment, what scared me the most was the ability of other people to hold me accountable to the expression of such desire in ways that were morally inflected: if I want intimacy in this moment, the assumption that I would want intimacy in future moments. Bringing some other cultural inflections into the picture, if I wanted something and my parents couldn’t afford it, it was a statement about their ability to provide (enough, not enough) or a statement about my needs (appropriate, too much). It was a statement about the discrepancy between the present and the future. The present was simply
I found it hard to initiate long term romantic relationships because though I enjoyed the moment, I could not see a moment beyond the present. People wanted me to commit and I don’t think that it was any malicious intent; I just didn’t know what it meant to look towards the future, because in my mind it didn’t exist at all. I thought that such an ability might grow or become apparent once I tried to make it appear.
Eventually, I think it was something that would take a lot more than a vague curiosity and even brute emotional force on my own part.