The Realm of Hungry Ghosts
On Wanting and Having
Thomas and Edward met the autumn they were twenty-two, in a city that promised everything and delivered it in denominations too small to count. They recognized something in each other immediately. That particular hunger that wears good suits and calls itself ambition.
In those early years, they were hungry in the usual ways. For money. For women who looked like they belonged in photographs. For rooms where important things happened that they happened to be standing in. They chased these things together with the kind of fervor young men mistake for friendship, and sometimes, late at night, walking home together they believed themselves happy.
But something in both of them was narrowing as something else expanded. Thomas filled rooms: with furniture, with people, with plans that required other plans to support them.
Edward emptied them: always calculating the next place he needed to be, always half-present in the service of some future moment when he would finally, fully arrive. When they were together they fed each other’s hunger the way two flames feed on the same wind.
Body. Soul. Mind. Sensations: the body. Desires: the soul. Reasoning: the mind. To experience sensations: even grazing beasts do that. To let your desires control you: even wild animals do that—and rutting humans, and tyrants. — III. 16
The years did what years do. They met less often now. First it was rooftops, then restaurants, then only while in the intermittent glow of screens they carried everywhere like hearts removed for safekeeping. They made money, tremendous amounts of it. The money made them worse.
Their apartments filled with beautiful objects and their calendars filled with beautiful plans. But they scrolled through dinners now. Their thumbs moved across glass with the compulsive rhythm of men searching for water in a desert made entirely of water.
“What are you looking for?” Thomas asked once, watching Edward’s face flicker blue in the dark of a restaurant where the food sat cooling between them.
Edward looked up, and for a moment his eyes were the eyes of something very old.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll recognize it when I find it.”
Thomas nodded. He understood. He was looking for the same thing.
The cruelty of it was they were both surrounded by abundance. The world kept offering itself in an infinite ribbon of bright images and information and somewhere in there was the thing that would finally fill their hollow. They believed this. They had to. Because to would mean sitting still in a room with only themselves which was a poverty neither could afford.
They last saw each other at a gathering so late it had become early as the sky was pearling toward a dawn neither wanted. They stood by the window together but neither could remember the last time they had spoken being fully present.
“Do you remember,” Edward started to say.
But he did not finish, because he was not sure what he was asking Thomas to remember, and because his phone had lit up in his hand, and because the question itself felt like reaching for something that had already receded beyond his grasp.
Thomas nodded anyway.
Outside, the city brightened. Somewhere a glass was filled and emptied and filled.
And they stood there together, two old friends in a room of abundance, their throats too narrow to swallow, their bellies too vast to fill. Both reaching for something they would recognize when they found it, something that was already here, had always been here, waiting for them to stop.