[Requiem] February challenge - Desire
Feb. 17th, 2011 10:27 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
http://users.livejournal.com/_crimsonearth/ posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
writing_shadowsDesire.
It’s one of those stirring, pleasurable, anxious, burning things that pervades every sense, and every inch of you – isn’t it?
Except when you’re dead.
No stirring in your gut, no heart beginning to race, no blossoming of your flesh to an inviting swell and blush, no lump in your throat. Desire, now, is all in the mind and the heart. But I don’t care.
As a girl I felt desire; my body would weaken at the sight of the man I loved, a pang of warmth would ripple through my insides, and I would look over at him and not have to think or articulate why. I just wanted him. Against all sense and reason, against moral decency and law and society, I wanted him.
It’s different now, and I have heard more times than I can count that all we can hope for is a shadow of the past; I have been preached to about blasphemy, about illusion, about clinging on to memories and whispers and shadows.
I don’t care.
I don’t need my body to make a display of itself to tell me that I am still capable of feeling. Desire might be, to some, just the wanting of something they have lost and cannot ever get back. I pity them.
Nothing now is a shadow of before, and no God or man or vampire can dictate the limits or capabilities of my heart. I want. I feel. I love.
In mortals the body translates to the mind; chemical reactions, compatible scents and genes, periods of fertility and sexual ripeness dictate attraction and the intellectual and emotional counterparts follow in short order. In Kindred, it begins in those faculties. Our Beasts repel us and drive us to dark thoughts, but our humanity prevails – we take fire at the wonts and words and whims of others, we are stirred by the battle with the Beast, by the brilliance and beauty and balance of dark and light in those around us, in spite of the cursed shadow that roars within us. We are gifted with fresh eyes with which to see the world and all its flaws but our passion, our strength, our desire steps outside of all of that and burns brighter, fiercer, harder, longer.
To love and desire for a few paltry decades and have our bodies do the work is easy; and even then, the desire dulls over time. To love for a few glorious lifetimes and not be seduced into blindness by chemistry and biology is far more profound. Take away the immediacy of the physical, and the intellectual and emotional become all the stronger.
The Beast is selfishness and cruelty and darkness and death but we are more than just our Beasts. As if mortal love and desire were not just as tainted, just as dangerous, just as self-serving and spattered with sin. Death does not deny me the want to give and not just take, the ache for something more than just the intrigues of politics and society and blood, or the ability to find it in someone else and feel it flourish.
Hide from it, deny it, dispute it all you please; you do not know my heart. And maybe some night, yours will feel the fire again too and you will see the glimmer of light in your darkness.
It’s one of those stirring, pleasurable, anxious, burning things that pervades every sense, and every inch of you – isn’t it?
Except when you’re dead.
No stirring in your gut, no heart beginning to race, no blossoming of your flesh to an inviting swell and blush, no lump in your throat. Desire, now, is all in the mind and the heart. But I don’t care.
As a girl I felt desire; my body would weaken at the sight of the man I loved, a pang of warmth would ripple through my insides, and I would look over at him and not have to think or articulate why. I just wanted him. Against all sense and reason, against moral decency and law and society, I wanted him.
It’s different now, and I have heard more times than I can count that all we can hope for is a shadow of the past; I have been preached to about blasphemy, about illusion, about clinging on to memories and whispers and shadows.
I don’t care.
I don’t need my body to make a display of itself to tell me that I am still capable of feeling. Desire might be, to some, just the wanting of something they have lost and cannot ever get back. I pity them.
Nothing now is a shadow of before, and no God or man or vampire can dictate the limits or capabilities of my heart. I want. I feel. I love.
In mortals the body translates to the mind; chemical reactions, compatible scents and genes, periods of fertility and sexual ripeness dictate attraction and the intellectual and emotional counterparts follow in short order. In Kindred, it begins in those faculties. Our Beasts repel us and drive us to dark thoughts, but our humanity prevails – we take fire at the wonts and words and whims of others, we are stirred by the battle with the Beast, by the brilliance and beauty and balance of dark and light in those around us, in spite of the cursed shadow that roars within us. We are gifted with fresh eyes with which to see the world and all its flaws but our passion, our strength, our desire steps outside of all of that and burns brighter, fiercer, harder, longer.
To love and desire for a few paltry decades and have our bodies do the work is easy; and even then, the desire dulls over time. To love for a few glorious lifetimes and not be seduced into blindness by chemistry and biology is far more profound. Take away the immediacy of the physical, and the intellectual and emotional become all the stronger.
The Beast is selfishness and cruelty and darkness and death but we are more than just our Beasts. As if mortal love and desire were not just as tainted, just as dangerous, just as self-serving and spattered with sin. Death does not deny me the want to give and not just take, the ache for something more than just the intrigues of politics and society and blood, or the ability to find it in someone else and feel it flourish.
Hide from it, deny it, dispute it all you please; you do not know my heart. And maybe some night, yours will feel the fire again too and you will see the glimmer of light in your darkness.
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