We Want So Much to Be Ourselves

Roland’s longing trailed after him as he walked, a sort of dirigible, attached by a silver filament that tugged and tugged without ever lightening his step.

“Why’s that thing always following you around?” his brother asked. “Haven’t you already got everything you could possibly want?”

Roland didn’t bother to argue, not because his brother was right (wasn’t it simple fact that human desire was endlessly replenishable?), but because his brother was a very small man with the jaw of someone twice his size. He walked with his jaw foremost, his shoulders hunched and his elbows back, as if he were being bent nearly to the ground by the burden of all the things he couldn’t have. If anyone were to be followed around by a dirigible of longing, it ought to have been Roland’s brother, but the air above his hunched shoulders was a void. And this seemed sad to Roland, although many things struck him as sad.

What is longing, but joy as a form of pain? An alertness of the whole body to a focal point in the ideal? Or an alertness to life itself, which is nothing, after all, but desire’s endless battle with possibility? Or is it grief in reverse? A sorrow-inflected celebration of something yet to be? Of something, perhaps, on the next train? Or a few blocks down, walking the boulevard with a lost look in its eyes? Or asleep in that sun-gilded field just there, beside the current-braided brook?

Roland’s girlfriend asked him the same question as his brother on numerous occasions, mostly at night, when he would haul the dirigible down out of the sky and tether it to a tree in his back yard. Often the dirigible would shift restlessly in the constant nocturnal rearrangement of the atmosphere, and the soft wumphs of its inflated flanks would sound along the whole length of the bedroom wall. “I don’t know,” he would tell her. “I can’t help it. It’s not like I want it hanging around like this.” He knew, of course, that what she really objected to was that she wasn’t enough all on her own to satisfy his longings. He wanted to tell her that just because in the midst of this perfectly okay world there was (dirigible-shaped, lighter than air) the chance of a better world didn’t mean he loved her any less, but he couldn’t figure out how to say that without insulting her.

His longing was an embarrassment. Everywhere he went, there it was: hovering over roofs and treetops, silent, silver, like an enormous fish, but eyeless and finless, drifting diagonally against the sky. Strangers on the bus would shake their heads ruefully. Others would roll their eyes, make laughlike noises, and wink, as if they knew him, as if they had drunk with him late into the night and watched the sunrise at his side, as if they had sniffed the very air of his longing and it had made them giddy and duck-voiced.

One day he turned onto a crooked street and found himself alone, except for a young woman in flip-flops, a backpack slung off one shoulder. Hers was the gentle contentedness of someone who has done no wrong. But, as the shadow of his dirigible passed over her, he saw her surprise turn into a crippling sort of weakness. In one instant she could no longer move, her eyes upturned toward the sky. Then she began to shrink and break into her constituent parts, which themselves turned into clumps of pale ash as they came to rest on the cobblestones. A wind blew. Not very strong. Eddying around the lampposts. Then she was gone: a wisp sweeping fleetly to the far end of the street, then out onto the sunlit avenue.

Roland’s boss: a squat man in light-warping glasses, his gray stubble turning black as it descended his temples to his cheeks and chin. “Here,” he said, handing Roland a pair of industrial-grade...