I want to travel to cities around the world to wander alone.

I want to raise my face to the warm sun, a flowered sundress swirling around my thighs, bare feet on hard earth.  I want the floppy hat on my head to blow off in a sudden gust of wind  just so I can chase it down the street, giggling the entire way.

I want a purse that holds a well-used journal and a really good pen. What more could I need?

I want enough money for food and dusty books and things I want because I want them.  Wanting because I want will be reason enough to have.

I want no timeline, no agenda, no company. I am free to watch and absorb. To talk only when I want to. To turn cartwheels in the street, or laugh out loud, to make love to a delicious stranger, to let the delight of random things roll through my body and take me over for no other reason than that they delight me.

I want to give myself over to an orgy of desire and hedonism. I want to dance naked on a beach with a group of wild lovers, slide my bare body through the slick coolness of my ocean home until my gills return.   I want to eat things I have never heard of, let the juices from unfamiliar fruits drip down my face and lick my fingers and let it all dry in the sun.  I want sit at a long, well worn bar and tell my stories to an ancient bartender who does not speak my language but knows that my story is his story is everyone’s story.  I want to let the whiskey burn a path down my throat as I lock eyes with a brown-haired goddess whose hips move with the rhythm of the ancients.  I want to ruthlessly claim the joy of all experience, take it right to my center and taste it’s rough edges.

I want to recite poetry on a street corner, turning my floppy hat upside down to collect change from passersby. I want to throw these foreign coins in foreign fountains and wish for nothing but an extension of  reality.  I want to spend the last of my earnings on a glass of fine red wine and a loaf of crusty bread and some pages of blank paper and see what magic comes from that.

I want to follow my ceaseless longing, wallow in the lonely ache until my own company becomes the most exquisite companionship. I want to belong to no one and contain myself wholly.  I want to give myself over to every last thing that makes itself available to me with the knowledge that i am only becoming more.

I want to spend so long without speaking or hearing voices that the only sound in my head is the truth of the poems that are waiting to be born.

I want to sleep in a room with tattered wallpaper, overlooking a square in a town older than memory. I want to perch on my windowsill and spy on old men riding rickety bicycles and lovers having petty quarrels and roaming dogs and children playing hopscotch in the street below.  I want a bed that has been used by lovers and mothers and babies and old people and to feel them there with me as I sleep, living and breathing and fucking and birthing and dying in the space where I take my deepest exhale.

I want the rush of sweet sin and the holy hush of ancient temples.  The worship of bodies and the profanity of prayer.  I want to be brought to my knees by both.

I want to disappear into a crowd and reappear in the spotlight of a burlesque show.

I want to live ruthlessly.  To invite because I want to invite.  To sever because I want to sever.  To trust with reckless abandon my own intrinsic knowing.

I want to ride dusty trains to destinations I cannot pronounce, dive into conversations with lost souls and found souls and everyone in between.

I want to walk so far and so long that my body aches and my skin is covered in salt sheen.  I want to end with my toes dancing in the waves and my hair blowing wild around my head.

I want to receive a spontaneous invitation from a ridiculously handsome man to attend the wedding of people I have never met.  I want to dance with him under unfamiliar stars to songs sung in an unfamiliar language.  I want to close my eyes as he whispers in my ear words that require no translation.  And then I want to leave him, abruptly, and spend the entire evening letting the bride’s raunchy grandmother regale me with tales of her her younger years  –  stories of crazy adventure and tortured suitors and unrequited love and fevered, desperate affairs.

I want to spend endless days in musty antique shops discovering memories of my future in relics of other people’s past.  I want to hold them to my ear and listen to old love stories in the whispers of dust and long ago,  building my own memoirs from the lure of things discarded and things yet to be known.

I want to smell like fresh dirt, yellow roses, steamy sex and exotic perfume. I want to taste like oaky wine, and trails of tears and dark chocolate melted in the desert sun. I want to feel like gritty sand and smooth silk after a rainstorm and the skin of a peach by moonlight.  I want you to be able to catch a glimpse of me from across a crowded square and instinctively know these things and be filled with your own yearning for yellow roses and gritty sand and desert sun without really understanding why.

I want to be lit from within by the unending intoxication of this blessed life.  An internal bonfire of all I have been given and all that I have claimed and all that I have let slip away in my quest for wholeness.  I want to burn down in the fire of selfish desires and selfless sacrifice and use the flames to light the spark that moves you toward your destiny.  I want to live in the glory of the ashes that remain.

I want nobody to be waiting for me, but everyone to trust in my eventual return.

I want to travel to cities around the world to wander alone.

~~~~

Tell me, lover, what is it that you want?  For in the wanting, and the naming, your truth can be found.