Name Your Desires
By Angela Townsend
Listen to Angela Townsend reading Name Your Desires:
I should know better than to invite certain visitors. I have occupied this ramshackle cerebellum long enough to know where its floorboards creak. I have no business reading articles with titles like Name Your Desires! The exclamation point itself is a squirrel spelunking my chimney. No good can come from this.
Some souls are hospitable to this guest. The chambers of their hearts are airy and inviting. There is gardenia potpourri in the powder room and no cat hair in the coffee pot. They are prepared for Name Your Desires! They have a stack of magazines ready to clip into collages. They will hang placeholder husbands and Polynesian islands on their refrigerators until every lovely hunger becomes manifest. They will name it. They will attain it.
I will be hiding in a pillow fort with the cat.
Name my desires? Is this an invocation or an inquest? The implication is that they are out there somewhere, playing unsupervised until I call them home for dinner. But what if I tell you that they are here? How dare you want me to want more. I am the Alamo. I am Alhambra. I am the Bastille in the storm. I am prepared to throw lightning bolts at vagrant desires caught trespassing my property.
Name Your Desires! I desire a notarized guarantee that I will never again live in a panopticon. I cannot find an appropriate image from Real Simple for that collage. Architectural Digest has not yet featured “The Best Backsplash for Your Panopticon,” or “A Traditional Panopticon Christmas,” or “French Country Panopticons.”
A panopticon is, of course, a natty circular prison where overlords can observe you at all times, from all angles. When Hearst finally gets around to establishing an all-panopticon magazine, the tag line will be, “Nowhere to hide!”
Placeholder husbands do not desire to become panopticon wardens. I respect the collagists cutting out pictures of Matthew McConaughey or Noam Chomsky. (Taste in placeholder husbands is as wide as the genome.) But fatten those fellas into three dimensions, and things may turn undesirable.
I desire to forget that I was once observed using the incorrect side of the dish sponge. Justice was swift. The record also shows me laughing with my mother at volumes unsuited to panopticons. It did not escape the searchlight when I underlined the wrong paragraphs or exceeded the approved quantity of exclamation points. Alarms shrieked when I drank coffee at an unbecoming rate. It was a difficult weekend in the panopticon when I persisted in seditious acts of wearing orange.
Name Your Desires! I desire to do my own stunts. You say I want too little? I say there is no greater desire than the life you already love.
I desire to write gushy birthday cards to everyone I have known since high school. I desire the postal addresses of the people I knew before high school. I desire my own permission to improvise weird hymns in the kitchen.
I desire to collect holidays the way great-aunts collect thimbles. Give me my mother’s birthday and Easter and Christmas. Give me Shark Week and Toyotathon and Amazon Prime Day. Give me all the Tuesdays and strawberry moons and Feast Days of St. Eusebius that I can fit in my mouth.
And now we are in the foyer of outer space, because I have begun to Name My Desires!
I desire a pair of cats I can name Ganache and Penuche. I desire an encore career as a United Nations General Observer. I desire a chaste kiss from Viggo Mortensen on the top of my head. I desire a world in which desires dilate our eyes far beyond marriage and microfiber sectionals.
I desire my mother to outlive me. I desire unlimited insulin for everyone who needs it. I desire quantum Beatitudes to recalibrate the cosmos. I desire a good night’s sleep. I desire no animals ever be eaten again ever. I desire full recovery from the trauma inflicted by Watership Down.
I desire the opportunity to hug certain obscure authors tightly in heaven. I desire the ability to forgive everyone. I desire enough Pushcart Prizes to cause a traffic incident. I desire washcloths that remain soft. I desire exclamation points, sometimes dotted with hearts or daisies.
I do not particularly desire anyone ever being in my condo ever again, except the cat, my mother, and possibly Viggo. I do not desire to renew my subscription to Panopticon Living.
I desire a day trip to Paris. I desire the knowledge of which branch of the military Captain Crunch served. I desire all swords turned into balloon animals. I desire everyone on my Sad List to become chronically well, solvent, or whatever will bump them back onto just the birthday card list. I do not particularly desire to become civilized, besides which, it is probably too late.
I desire good weather for mending my patch of the brokenhearted world. I desire a glimpse of God’s collage. I do not know the name for my desires. You say I desire too little? I say, watch me. Far better, don’t.
Angela Townsend is the development director at a cat sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. She is a Best of the Net nominee, and her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, CutBank, Paris Lit Up, Pleiades, SmokeLong, and Terrain, among others. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 34 years and laughs with her poet mother daily.