Spellbound and Swallowed

She still thinks about him sometimes, which is ridiculous and frustrating, because it’s been years and she lives someone else and has built an entire life that she chose and mostly likes, and the man she thinks about wasn’t even that good for her, she can see that now, she could see it then if she’s honest. But the wanting is still there. It’s quieter than it used to be. It doesn’t wreck her day or anything. It’s more that her brain goes there when she’s not paying attention, and she catches herself, and she’s annoyed, because she assumed this would have sorted itself out by now. But, wanting doesn’t follow the understanding, that you can know yourself thoroughly through the therapy, the reading, the decades of watching your own patterns play out, and the wanting just stays there, unchanged, and you can describe it perfectly and it makes no difference.

The neuroscientist Kent Berridge found that wanting and liking run on completely different circuits in the brain, which explains a lot more than anyone in therapy wants it to. You can stop liking something and keep wanting it. The wanting doesn’t care what you’ve learned. It doesn’t update.

You spent twenty years believing you’d eventually arrive at a version of yourself who wanted the right things, and she never showed up. You waited for her. You did the work you were supposed to do, you read the books and talked to the therapist and paid attention and forgave yourself and all the rest of it, and the woman who came out the other end still wants the same things the woman who went in did. Still wants the devouring, flesh melting in to flesh nights. Still wants the war torn morning bed, wet with sweat and semen and redolent with stale wine and fags and the hasty, urgent multi-orgasm hangover sex.

The heart wants what the heart wants and the impossible yearning for one particular body and total indifference to any sort of substitute, is without any kind of rational explanation. She supposed the wanting will go on. Like grief it will dull and then hijack her in unexpected moments.