Scorched by longing
Caroline Polachek's "Welcome to my Island"
Sometimes you hear a song that makes you want to punch at the air.
When I first listened to Caroline Polachek’s “Welcome to my Island,” I was driving through Berkeley at ten pm. Isaiah and I had spent the last week scraping moss off a concrete, sprinkling soil onto clay, and spraying it to make a table that was breathing and alive.
Driving home from this endeavor, I listened to Polachek’s new single. It was the chorus that got me, the punchy beat and swoop of synths erupting into her screeching, “Desire, I want to turn into you.”
Listening to it, I wanted to punch the air, and drive fast through the night. My legs were itchy, remembering long nights out at 18 with the city as a sleeping backdrop, the feeling of being at a sweaty show you know everyone at, having a crush and hoping they notice you, driving alone over star drenched canyons. I wanted to run. I was a college student, and the song made me feel the part.
Now it’s the lyric “Desire, I want to turn into you,” (which is also the title of Polachek’s album) that I’m stuck on. Is Polachek expressing the want to turn towards the object of desire, or turn into them? Is desire being marked here as an urge to turn away from oneself and in the direction of another? Or is it the longing to become somebody else? Do I desire you only because I want you to take me away from myself?
Having a crush fixates your attention in a way that can be agonizing. You want to know about another person; you hope for their attention and you orient yourself in a direction that you think will help you obtain it. You paint your nails; you study your closet; you linger on AIM with a carefully crafted away message present in hopes that you’ll see their screen name pop up.
But a crush also gives you an instrument through which to look more deeply at yourself. What does this person represent to you? What in them do you crave? Thinking on the many crushes I have had, I wonder, did I want them, or did I want to run down wet pavement at night, holding a secret of desire?
You have a crush and you put someone on a pedestal. You write them into your fantasies; you use them as a vehicle to imagine the ways your life would change. Maybe it doesn’t feel that deep–you’re horny, you’re lonely, you want someone to be close to and they seem cool.
But in the most obsessive crushes I’ve had, there’s been a fixation on the idea of the person, and an erasure of them as a living, breathing person who has their own flaws and ticks. They became an object of desire. When I was seven years old, I began my first journal. Page after page of it is filled with me writing my name alongside the name of boy I had a crush on. More pages are then spent trying to write the “story” of him.
This writing stories about another didn’t end as I got older. It’s funny to look back and see how much of our deep longings and hopes are already articulated at a young age. What was I seeking in writing the story of another? I wanted to understand them, but my desire was rooted in a deeper hope. I wanted to feel understood. When the spaces around you don’t seem to offer a path of understanding, the fantasy of another person can do so.
In the Thrillhouse basement, Alberto said that nobody is really as different as they’d like to believe. We all want to believe we’re special, he said, with loud guitars thrashing behind us. I said that people will respond to writing as profound because they feel a writer has recorded what is in their head. They think the writer gets them on a deeper level than usual. They think the writer holds access to some immense knowledge about them. But a writer doesn’t know anything about any particular person. They are only poking at their own perceptions.
When you feel engaged by someone’s writing, when you feel caught in someone’s lyrics, you two aren’t having a private conversation separated from the rest of the world. Rather, it’s a sign that the world is not so separated. I don't really know anything about you but I can write into the space of you by writing into the space of myself.
Desire is rooted in the fantasy to be understood. “I want to turn into you”: I want to hide my head under your shoulder and write a new version of the world. Through desire, I want to move away from the details of my life and myself. “I want to turn into you,” or, I want to be in your orbit because I am tired of my own.
Desire is also a longing to grow beyond your present shape. “I want to turn into you,” as in, I want to become like you. I want my self to be remade in the language of you. I’m trying to go deep and see beyond my own confines and am using you as a vehicle to get there. I’m swimming in a pool and am surprised when I touch the bottom.
Maybe both of those articulations are missing the point. Maybe when Polachek howls, “Desire, I want to turn into you,” she is not speaking to a person. Maybe she’s speaking to desire itself.
“Desire,” she whispers, she coos, she bats her eyelashes, she screeches, she throws up lava with Mount Edna erupting behind her. “Desire,” she shouts, “I want to turn into you.”
This isn’t about wanting another. It’s about recognizing that any want for another is a projection outside of the self; an avoidance of our reflections. You dig into the depths of desire and find that it’s not about wanting to get closer to any other person. I’m scorched by longing, and what I want, what I’ve always wanted, is to run down wet pavement at night with my chest heaving. I want to scream into the sense of being alive. I want to tug at the boundaries of myself, and see you staring back at me.
Listening:
“What does this person represent to you? What in them do you crave?” -- meditating on these today. Love these crush thoughts. 💕
Caroline Polachek's album has been in heavy rotation for me since it was released (I keep going back to Smoke and Fly to You especially). As someone with a history of being engulfed and immobilised by crushes I can relate to a lot of this.
I was also reminded of a lyric from Aphasia by Pinegrove while reading this:
"One day I won't need your love,
One day I won't define myself by the one I'm thinking of."