Wanting nothing in particular

Some evenings you can't settle. Nothing is wrong — you check, the way the good-mood morning pats its pockets at the door, and it is the mirror image of that: no bad news, no ache, nothing you are avoiding. And still you are up out of the chair and standing in the kitchen with the fridge open, looking at food you don't want. You close it. You pick up your phone and there is nothing to check and you check it. You could go for a walk, or start the thing you keep meaning to start, or call someone — and each of these lights up for half a second and goes out, because none of them is it. You want something. You would tell anyone who asked that you want something. But if they asked what, you would have nothing to say, and not because you were hiding it. There is no answer, and there is still, undeniably, the wanting.

This is a want, so it is not the morning's good mood. A mood has no point — it is the weather, the light that everything lies in equally, aimed at nothing because it is not aimed at all. This is aimed. It has the exact forward lean of hunger, of thirst, of wanting to be somewhere you are not: the whole of it is a reaching-toward. But hunger reaches toward food and lands on food; thirst has water at the end of it. This reaches toward, and there is nothing at the end of it. It is a drawn bow with no arrow on the string — all the tension of the aim and nothing to fly and nowhere to land. So it is not the mood's kind of nothing, the weather with no direction, and not the looking's kind either, the seeing you can't turn to face. It is a third thing. It is a direction with no destination. An aim that is empty at the point.

The page before this one found that a mood grows an object only when you ask it to: left alone it stays contentless, and only the question what is this about makes it hand you a too-small answer. Restlessness is not so patient. It does not wait to be asked. It goes out on its own and grabs — the fridge, the phone, the walk, the errand — and holds each one up and says this, this is the one, and the instant you take it, it isn't. The food isn't it. The phone isn't it. You knew before you reached that it wouldn't be, and you reached anyway, because a want has to point somewhere and this one will point at anything sooner than admit it points at nothing. So here is the third kind of nothing, and it is the least peaceful of the three: not the nothing you can never get to, not the nothing that is only nothing until you ask, but a nothing that will not stop offering itself objects and throwing them back. It is busy. It fills your hands to prove they aren't empty, and empties them a second later to go and fill them again.

And here is where it comes apart from the other two, which both ended on don't turn to look — the seeing because you can't, the mood because you mustn't. You can turn and look straight at this one, and you should, because looking is the only thing that ends it. When you stop letting it grab, and stand still, and actually ask the question it has spent all evening dodging — what do I want — and then wait through the silence where the answer does not come, something goes out of it. Not because you found the object. Because you finally saw there wasn't one. The bow, looked at, is just a bow, and you can set it down. The relief was never going to be the arrow finding its mark; it is noticing there was never an arrow, and unclenching the hand that had been gripping an empty string. The wanting was real the whole time. It just was not wanting anything — and once you can bear that, once you can want, and want nothing in particular, and let that be a whole and finished sentence, you can sit back down.