Serena was right, you know, about desire. Now that I’ve seen this story to its mortal end, I know she was right. We were all sick with want that summer, stupid with it. I wanted Luke. I wanted Serena. I wanted my father. I wanted belief. I wanted transcendence. It’s not as though I was unusual. In fact, I was trite. But now, I think this is what disturbs me most about religious seekers, as a group—they want so badly, so obviously. They want enlightenment, they want release, they want connection. They are like baby birds, their mouths and necks stretched to impossible sizes, their eyes enormous in their soft skulls, watery and blue with desire. They’re waiting and waiting and waiting for a strange foreign man in authentic robes to come and pour a bucket of pure light marked Real Religion down their cold crying throats. It’s gross, in the end, to want something so badly. And look, after all, where all that wanting gets you.

Now I prefer not to want. It is much more dignified. I guess I turned out to be a Buddhist after all.

But maybe not quite, because these days, waiting in bars after a dull day of work to meet other unhappy strangers, or in my cold, empty apartment, reading desperate novels in the bathtub, it’s the act of desire and not its object that most effectively seduces me. It’s not strong shoulders or soft lips or kindness, or whatever it is women supposedly want in men, when they do, but simply being desired. What I’m saying is, I would get wet for a slab of granite if I was convinced it wanted me badly enough. Lithophilia, etc. This doesn’t change any of my above feelings re: want. It only makes me say, what a fucking masochist.