Defining a Yearning

  Sometimes I just yearn for it. I cannot think of a better word than "yearn", although, and I don't know if it's peculiar to me, I connote a sort of sexual eagerness to the word.  It's not sexual though, but if I had to be a neuroscientist and make a hypothesis about it, I'd suggest that the neural connections buzzing in my brain whenever I get this yearning run a similar course to the sexual yearn. I think the difference between the sex yearn and this yearn is I don't imagine the adrenaline as hot, sweaty blood coursing through my body... it is cooler, denser... less salty.


  Apparently, according to my journal, I yearn for it much more than I do for boys-- because I have never scribbled poetry about a boy before. But one night high on oxycodone (an honest drug to relieve the pain of an honest injury), I guess I wrote poetry about it. I open my journal almost biannually, and on one such rare occasion, I found the poem I had (apparently) written in illegible left-hand jottings. As I set myself to the task of transcribing the poem into less-illegible, right-handed jottings I began to feel the yearning again-- a strange, strong yearning.

        
          Cool, like the clear river water,
          Slipping sweetly over our skin
          on those perfect days in June

          as the sun was slowly replacing the moon

                 
   I felt it--the yearning. It was strange, strong, and similar to the feelings felt that summer I worked in the welding shop. That summer I was covered in steel dust, face and teeth; black eyebrows silvered with slivers of steel. We worked inside smelting pots, those giant heat-convectors that hold molten aluminum. "Before the aluminum would ever be poured into the pot," I often thought, "They'll sure have a job removing the molten body melted into the corner I am welding shut." It was so hot, so incredibly hot that an urge and a yearning would rise from the few uncooked organs in my heat-stroked belly whenever I looked across the highway and down the hillside that led to the river-- that deep-chill, black-blue, I-need-to-jump-into river.

               

   I want to jump into the parts where no plumb line could determine the depth. I want to feel that fear of the unknown watery world transform into some fear that is manageable, and beautiful. I want to conquer. I want to enjoy. I want to wade in the shallows. I want sunshine and water to mingle and become liquid light between my fingers. And at night, if I'm lucky, I want the light of the moon to turn the water into dark ink, and I want to slip into it without making a ripple, and I want to feel the river rushing over me, and the rocks beneath my feet, and the sediment ever moving downstream. I want to sit on the bank, on the beach, on the dock and stare at it, inhaling the cool of the chilled air that rests inches above the river in reluctance to rise to mix into the warmer atmosphere.

         
          Content to sit cool and still as we were,

          Emulating the air

          Emulating the cool of the air

          its rise above the water

          Content to sit there