The depravity of desire

Desire squats on her life like the brown wedges with turquoise stones on the t-bar strap she picked up last week: not needed, but hard to not need.

She rummages through the internet everyday, like the chest of drawers at home, pulling out things and lives she likes, stuffing the rest back in, haphazardly, in an orderly chaos that always lets her pull the right rabbit out of the hat.

However snazzily she cloaks it, hiding it under different needs each day - this voyeurism is starting to smart at her conscience now. Peeping Tom, she chides herself. Peeping into lives that she wished she was living. Homes she wished she had helped build. Food she wished she could cook and serve and gloat over. Jokes she wished she could've used to break up the thick silence at home.

And all that, that is around her, the dependable life she is living, the home with its klutzy inhabitants and inherited furniture, the greasy food of the age-old maharaj, the efficient conversation of discord-free days, all that is so hard to need.

She has learnt to make the right choices, the ones tagged practical. She even knows the right things to say, the right time and the right people. But her betraying words are like her shoe-choices: they are not what she needs, but so hard to not need.

There are voices in her head today, some have always been there: washing dirty linen in public. She wonders why these words won't go, why her ears are hot, why there's a squeamish feeling of having stumbled upon something putrid, private and not needed.