1001 Nights Cast

Can we be more than our longings?

He had written that in red marker in one corner of the whiteboard in his office.

He didn’t know the answer.

He thought of his longings as curtains, of various thicknesses and colours, ascending from floor to ceiling in the great space that made up whoever it was that he was. The curtains didn’t support the structure, but they were its most obvious feature. They dominated it. En masse, they shivered in the breeze. Things could lurk behind them. Shadows, rising up, and masked by, this desire or that.

He ached, in that place, within his mind, where he was at once an observer and the observed. The curtains and the space, he himself watching it, within the room, and the room.

Every time he made the cross-border journey from merely being to reflection, the curtains stung him, like jellyfish or hard words, or memories. The curtains were stoic and a little cruel, what they lacked in common sense they made up for in determination. They remained. He found no comfort in them, sometimes there was barely room to move, to breathe. A curtain may come unmoored, and twist and turn and snap at him in the wind.

Which was why it was a ridiculous image. But he kept returning to it.

There was nowhere to sit within the space of him, and even if there had been, he would not have sat there. These longings were too urgent, he knew it would be detrimental to his stability, should he pause too long, because a longing over-considered, is a madness, or a stabbing pain.

How can we be so shiftless within ourselves? Why is there always motion?

He had scrawled that too upon the whiteboard.

He did not tend to his longings.

He left that to some deeper more mechanical part of him. His only engagement with them was his entry into that curtain-crowded space. He was pointedly a modest man. He kept his expectations low.

He liked to walk in the evenings, but he didn’t walk far, and always before sunset, before it got dark.

He loved his wife, but it was a longing fulfilled. And it didn’t count, because when they had met, he had yet to discover the space within him, and its shivering fabrics.

Once, he had tried to tell her, to articulate this space within him. He had opened his mouth, and she had looked at him so intently, had asked him what was wrong, and all he had provided was a harsh response, a ‘nothing, why do you think anything is wrong,’ response.

He was loyal to her. He held her hand. Made love to her. Engaged in interesting, if somewhat bloodless, discourse. He considered her beautiful. But she was not part of that space. Not one of those rising, tumbling curtains.

He convinced himself that this did not matter, because he exercised the greatest possible restraint, and he was so considerate. At work he would push himself to think of her. Perhaps a joke she had uttered, or the sharp edge of her smile.

As he typed up a report, or ordered a coffee, he would steer his thoughts to what she might be doing. How her own work was progressing. He would send her a text, or dash off an email.

But it was all so much effort.

Sometimes he closed his eyes, and all he could see were the curtains, their motion ceaseless, their billowing movements hypnotic and various.

After his wife walked out, and did not come back, he realised that she had been leaving him over such a long time. Months and years of leaving. In fact, if he was honest, they had been leaving each other. He could point to no one moment that had caused the end of their relationship, just countless little steps all leading to that last day, the note, the messiness of divorce. It hurt, but it was the hurt of a wound that had formed and healed, however poorly, a long time ago. It was the hurt of inconvenience, and nothing more.

All he had left was the job, and their unit, and his longings. He knew which of those he most feared losing.

He continued on.

And one night, many months later, he dreamed a dream that was more of a memory, of a sunrise over Hawke Bay in New Zealand, and how he had stood on the pebbled beach, alone, his wife still asleep in the hotel. The bay curved darkly before him, and he had watched the yolk of the sun, rise up and spill over the water, and it had been just him, and that sun, and the most perfect moment.

But it hadn’t been perfect.

He had yearned, absolutely yearned for his wife. He had wanted her there, to share this perfect moment, but she was not. That yearning remained the most vivid part of the dream, clearer than the freshly dawned sun, the slap of the waves against the pebbled beach. It burned.

When he woke, he realised at last that she was contained within his longings. That his longing to have her there with all his other longings was enough, and should always have been enough.

For a moment he was happy, which is a long time to be happy.

He rolled over to her side of the bed, and longed for the immediate heat of her, for her company, but she wasn’t there, of course.

The space that was him, with all its curtains rising up, shivered restlessly and painfully, and he had his answer.