Nobody asks a fire to explain itself. But say out loud that you want something, and watch everyone lean in with the questions. Why that? For what? Is it worth it? And the worst one, the one that comes dressed up as wisdom: do you need it?
No. I don’t need it. That was never the point.
I’ve been thinking about how wants get interrogated. You stand in front of something you want. A guitar. A plane ticket. A ridiculous jacket. And before the wanting has even finished arriving, a courtroom opens in your head. The want has to testify. It has to present its case. It has to prove it will pay for itself, improve something, count as an investment, fit the story you tell about who you are.
Most wants die in that courtroom. Not because they lose. Because the trial never ends.
A kid wants the red guitar because it’s red. That’s the whole case. Somewhere along the way we teach kids that wanting without a reason is embarrassing, and they grow into adults who can’t say “I want it” without dressing it in something respectable. It’s for my career. It’s self care. It’ll be good for the feed. We put the want in a little business suit and send it out to negotiate.
The suit never fits.
I’ve caught myself doing this. Wanting something, then immediately building the justifications like I’m assembling a legal defense, then noticing the justifications are all addressed to nobody. There’s no judge. There never was. Just me, in front of the thing, wanting.
The strange part is that wanting is one of the most honest signals a body can send. Wanting is proof of life. It tells you what’s still awake in you before your mind gets a chance to vote. The mind will always find reasons to kill a want, because the mind is mostly a budget office. But the want showed up first, on its own, without asking permission. I think that arrival deserves respect before it deserves a verdict.
Here is what dead wanting looks like. Not sadness. Sadness at least wants things back. Dead wanting is flat. Nothing pulls at you. The shop window is just glass. The song is just noise. You ask yourself what you want and the question comes back empty, like knocking on a house where nobody lives.
So when a want shows up now, any want, I don’t interrogate it anymore. I let it in. I don’t always obey it. A want isn’t an order. But it gets heard as a message from somewhere in me that still has a pulse, and I stopped asking that part of me to fill out forms.
A scream works the same way, if you want to know what I mean. Metal does not clear its throat and explain itself. A scream is a want at full volume with no citation attached. Nobody stands in the pit demanding the scream justify itself. It just tears out, and everyone in the room understands, because everybody in that room has wanted something that bad and never once had a good reason why.
That’s why those rooms feel like church to me. A room full of people agreeing that wanting doesn’t have to make sense to be true.
I’m not saying every want deserves to be fed. Some wants are bad tenants, and you can refuse them while still admitting they’re real. What I’m done with is the default interrogation. The one that makes you build a case before you’re allowed to feel anything. The case never gets dismissed. The trial never ends. All it does is eat the years while you stand in front of the thing you wanted, building arguments, never touching it.
I want things. Some of them make sense. Most of them are just red, like the guitar.
Wanting is not a flaw in me. Wanting is the part of me that refused to go quiet.