Longing

There’s something about longing, isn’t there? The way it lingers, stretching itself across time like a thread you can’t quite unravel. It tugs at you when you're trying to sleep, when you're pretending to be interested in conversations, when you're staring out a window at a world that feels almost parallel to yours, as though the version of life you’re meant to have is just out of reach. Not far enough to abandon, but close enough to torture you. It’s not an ache—it’s more delicate, more persistent. An ache can be numbed. But longing—it burrows itself into the corners of your soul, nestling in between your breaths, clinging to your every thought.

You carry it with you, this constant hunger for something more. You wear it like a second skin, invisible to everyone else but so heavy, so unbearably heavy. And the cruelest part is that you’re not even sure what it is you long for. A person, perhaps, or the idea of a person. A moment, a version of yourself that you’ve lost along the way. Maybe it’s just the longing itself, this insatiable desire for something to fill the emptiness inside you, as though fulfillment was a thing you could hold if you ran hard enough, chased fast enough, loved deeply enough.

But that’s the thing with longing—it doesn’t let you stop. You keep running toward it, this thing that might not even exist. The more you want, the further it feels. Sometimes it feels like you’re on the edge of something—like if you just reached out your hand, you’d touch it. You’d have it. But you don’t. Not really. And the space between you and what you want never closes. It’s like running on a treadmill, exhausting yourself for something that remains just beyond your grasp. And still, you keep running. Why? Because the alternative—the stillness, the letting go—feels impossible. You can’t just stop. You can’t just let the longing die. It’s become part of you, a force so intertwined with who you are that losing it would feel like losing yourself.

There’s a strange beauty in it, though. In the way longing makes the world sharper, more alive. It makes you feel things more intensely, notice the small, quiet details of life because you’re always searching for meaning in them, hoping to find some hint, some sign that what you’re longing for is just around the corner. The way a song hits you differently when you’re consumed by wanting, the way the light slants through the trees in a way that feels both too beautiful and unbearably lonely. The way a person’s touch lingers longer, the way a glance across a crowded room can make your heart stop.

But longing—longing plays tricks on you. It builds things up in your mind, turns people into saviors, moments into destinies. It makes you think that if only you had that one thing, that one person, everything else would fall into place. You become convinced that the ache you carry would disappear, that life would finally be what it’s supposed to be. But would it? Or is the longing what keeps you alive? What if the pursuit is the only thing that gives you purpose? What if you catch it—this elusive thing—and realize it’s not what you thought? That it was never about the thing itself but about the chase, the dream, the possibility of what could be.

I think we’re afraid to admit that. We’re afraid that if we stop longing, we’ll have to face the emptiness underneath it. The silence. The truth that maybe, just maybe, there’s nothing that can fill that space we carry inside us. And so we hold on. We keep wanting. We convince ourselves that if we just wait a little longer, hold on a little tighter, that thing we’re reaching for will come. We tell ourselves that the pain is temporary, that the waiting will be worth it.

But what if it’s not? What if the thing you’ve been chasing turns out to be a mirage, fading the closer you get? What if the longing was the point all along? That you’ve been chasing the idea of something, not the thing itself. And what if you never get there—what then? How do you live with the knowledge that you might spend your entire life wanting something that will never be yours?

There’s no easy answer. Maybe you keep running. Maybe you learn to love the longing, to find beauty in the wanting itself. Maybe that’s enough. To live in the space between the desire and its fulfillment. To learn to breathe in that space, even when it feels like it’s crushing you. Because sometimes, that’s all we have—this endless pursuit. And in a way, isn’t that what makes us human? The wanting, the reaching, the hoping? Maybe that’s the point of it all. To keep longing, even when it hurts. To keep dreaming, even when it feels impossible.

Maybe that’s what love is, too. This endless pursuit. To long for someone so deeply, to chase after their shadow, to never stop wanting more of them. And maybe they’ll never be yours, not really. But the longing—the longing makes you feel alive in a way nothing else can. It’s both agony and ecstasy, hope and despair, and maybe that’s what makes it so beautiful. Maybe that’s what makes it worth it.