Desire Paths

The year before my mother left us, my father told me about desire paths—shortcuts, deviations worn into the ground by people who found a way to reach their destinations quicker than any official route could offer them. Les chemins du désir: a term coined by a French philosopher for the primal human need, equal parts physical and psychic, to move from one place to the next. My father was a landscape architect—he knew about such things. He was never speaking on any kind of metaphorical level; he simply wanted me to know the term for the little dirt trails that winged off the cobblestone walkways of the park near our house. Why they swooped towards the playground and the fountain, the pond and the pavilion, off towards the dark deepness of the woods. If you followed the cobblestones, they would lead you in a circle around the inside of the entire park. I understood how traversing the whole loop when you had already pinpointed where you wanted to go would only be a frustrating delay, a detainment between you and your desires. It’s poor design, my father said; inefficient, he deemed it. I could tell he was thinking about what he would have done if he had designed the park, if he had lived one hundred years earlier. What he could have done to prevent all of the digressions trod through the otherwise pristine grass, painstakingly manicured to obscure everything growing and shifting underneath.

For a time after that day in the park with my father, I was determined to create my own desire path: inscribe my own desires deep into the earth, leave a material record of my longings. For everyone to see, and follow, if they so chose. If they wanted to understand where both my body and my mind wandered to. The park was only a few blocks away, but there was an even quicker way to get there, through the woods behind our house. For almost a whole summer, I would leave each day and walk there, leaving my trail behind. Desire paths were usually created by many people trodding the same path over time; many people finding the same new way out or in, like the same passage in a handed-down book underlined again and again, many hands emphasizing that yes, this combination of words and sounds finally unlocked something in them that could not have been shaken loose before. But, I figured, one person had to begin it. Back then, I thought my own weight was enough to leave a mark in the world; my own desires loomed so large, hovering over everything else.

Every day, as if looking for something lost, I would retrace my own steps as closely as I could remember. I pretended I was an explorer, a cartographer. I would wind again and again through the woods late each morning, deliberate as a threaded needle, until I finally reached the clearing that led into the park. I wouldn’t stay for long until I turned back; the park itself became less and less alluring to me than the view of it from the edge of the woods, less alluring than the journey to it. By late summer, I had carved a discernible hollow into the ground, a blemish into the land that signaled I had been there. 

But then fall came, and school, and shrinking, colder days. By the winter, I went many weeks without venturing through the woods. Everything froze over, became smothered by snow. By the time spring came, my desire path was gone. I could not find it anymore; the earth had grown back over any sign I had been there at all.

I was an amorous child; I was full of desire. We lived in a house my parents and others described as “romantic.” Not the kind of romantic that means desire, they said—the other meaning. The kind that envisions the world and everything in it as softer, more beautiful, bent and trapped into more elegant shapes. But what’s the difference, I thought; to me, there was none. Our house was very old, like most everything in the town we lived in then. It was made of brick and had stained glass windows and turrets and spires and peaks. It creaked in the wind and under the weight of our feet like it was alive. Like it too had a beating heart. Haunted was just another word for romantic, either meaning.

My bedroom was in a tower, and it had its own staircase, and high, arching windows that wrapped around my bed. I loved winter best because of the sharpness of the light and the merciless way it illuminated me. In winter, in this light, I could see so much further, all the way through the neighborhood, to the edges of the park. There was a flat section of roof outside the window, just large enough to hold me sitting cross-legged, and I would climb out and sit and feel like not even time could reach me up there. The ceilings were high, and slightly cracked—staring up at them at night, I connected them into my own constellations, invented my own mythology that I lived the rest of my life inside.

Growing up in a house like that, I could not help but be romantic too, could not help but be inflamed by my own desires. I fell in love with everything, with everyone. The world! I was stunned by everything it had to offer—by just the way the sun leaked through my windows and cast perfect shapes on the floor, by the way the buds on the branches of the trees blossomed and blushed and fell again.

By contrast, my parents did not seem to be especially romantic to me, as I understood romance then—the desirous kind. I never saw them leaning off the balcony, kissing or embracing—even watching the sunset or just gazing into the distance. Their bedroom door was always unlocked. I never saw them dance to jazz music or get dressed up for a dinner out with each other at a fancy French restaurant or leave each other notes sealed with wax. Instead, they would sit across from each other at the kitchen table with the leaf inserted into the middle, even if no one was stopping by for dinner, sipping tea and reading their own chosen sections of the newspaper—neither of them ever read the whole thing; they never read each other’s sections. They may as well have been in different rooms, or different planets.

I thought this was all just because they were old. Old to me then was just older than me. To a point, I understood this. It was so easy to fall in love with the boys in my class, with their ragged-edged bravado, the tenderness of their red bare knees sticking out from shorts, even in the depths of winter, the cologne-scented clouds they left in their wake, but I remember not being able to imagine loving them as men, as tired, clean-shaven office-workers who courted romance with afternoon coffee dates and perfunctory, pre-made gestures that checked boxes off a list that ticked like a clock. I could not imagine how desire sustained itself without what I knew it to look like: stolen glances, sneaking out under the bleachers, late-night phone calls, and a question hanging over everything. The question of what the other person was thinking; were they thinking about you? I had thought then that marriage meant answering that question—yes—once and definitively, and into perpetuity. Desire functioned by making a duplicate of the person you loved inside your head, and that duplicate took on a life of its own—a version of them just for you. The duplicate was the shape of the person you loved filled in by a spiral of infinite questions—doors for your thoughts to go in and out of as you lay awake in the dark, a distant, endless place for your mind to wander around whenever you were not with that one person. I thought desire was a question unanswered; I thought my parents had answered their own questions about each other and there would not be any more.

My mother was a florist. She herself somehow resembled a flower to me—one long straight stem that came to a head, hair twisted like a rose into a chignon, something about her that closed and opened. Our house was filled with flowers; placed upon every conceivable surface, upon every nook and cranny, was some kind of vase with an arrangement, usually ones she did not sell in time and brought home, like dogs from the pound. But because our house had so many of these nooks and crannies, these little corners, many of these arrangements went forgotten and unwatered, and then wilted and drooped. Her favorites were gardenias, and they retained their strong saccharine scent even as they expired; the air of our home always stunk of their sweetness.

Our house was full of dead and dying flowers, but my mother still found them beautiful. There’s many types of beauty, she’d say, tragic beauty being just one of them. It was flowers’ ephemerality that made them beautiful, according to my mother; it was their finitude that made them precious. Wouldn’t all beauty be tragic beauty then? I asked her once. Well, yes and no, she said, and didn’t elaborate.

My mother believed flower arranging was an art, and like any art, it reflected its creator’s skills and thoughts. Like any art, it abided by a set of principles—opposition, transition, repetition, radiation, symmetry—to achieve aesthetic goals—unity, proportion, balance, rhythm. Harmony, beauty, and style. Every type of beauty was the result of everything being in the right place, every part having a place to belong to, my mother said. My father shared these beliefs in landscapes; it was these principles that had once united them, in some other time I would never know, as far away to me as a fairy tale.

But they differed in that my mother believed most heartily in the power of empty space. “Cultivate the art of leaving out,” she would say often, reciting from her favorite book, The Art of Flower Arrangement, which she read like a book of poetry rather than a handbook—often, deeply, reverentially. The Art of Flower Arrangement believed, as did she, that unfilled space was not a void but a capacity, a possibility, that it should be emphasized. That less was more. Her trademark arrangements were usually composed as if they were framing the empty air around them, a blooming flower crown coronating the invisible. In turn, our house itself reflected this belief; most of the rooms were occupied by only the essentials—a single lamp, a table and some chairs, one loveseat in the living room. The essentials, and dead flowers. This made our house feel even larger, made it echo more, made it harder for it to feel full, even if we were all at home.

According to my father’s own aesthetics, empty space was a blight, an oversight. A missed opportunity. He often tried to bring home objects he had found, mirrors or paintings or little knick-knacks, things he had passed at yard sales or seen in the window of the antiques store downtown. “I thought this would be a nice touch,” he’d say sometimes, presenting my mother with a new offering.  Or, “This would fill up some space,” at other times, when he was feeling bold. But my mother would always make him bring the things back to the store, or re-gift them to others. The outside of the house was his domain, she’d say; the inside was hers. Outside, the grass was meticulously cut and manicured and never overgrown—maintained at the optimal three inches, always. Sturdy and unsparing boxwood hedges encircled the house behind stone walls. A double fortress around our hollow home, protecting us or confining us, I was never sure.

My mother believed that flowers had desires. Of course they do, she said, the way they reach and grow and move towards the light. But my mother herself, I wasn’t so sure. There was something secretive about desire, even if it was bursting inside of you. And my mother was not secretive. She didn’t do things like stare at herself in the mirror like trying to see through to her soul, or take long, luxuriant, candlelit baths, or maintain locked diaries, or climb from her bedroom window onto the roof. That was me, and my mother didn’t understand me. She told me I took too long in the bathroom; she told me not to stare at myself so much. She told me I was too boy-crazy, always on the phone, always sneaking out. That I wasn’t the Queen of Sheba; where did I think I was going dressed like that? It was like flowers had grown in her mind where her desires used to be, that she was perpetually preoccupied by how to arrange and contain living things—long necked vases to emphasize and elevate, wood to complement natural life, metal to contrast it most strongly. Sentiments like these always echoed in my head, even though I had no use for them. My mother didn’t give me the advice I wanted; she didn’t tell me how to become a woman, she didn’t tell me how my own body would change and grow, but I knew all about how flowers would, from seed to fruit. Somehow, she planted something in me—it became that before I went to sleep at night, all I could see were flowers, dancing there against the darkness of my eyelids. They felt bright, brighter than the sun, as if they could blind me.

My mother was matter-of-fact and always on time, unequivocal and precise. She wore button-down white collared shirts, starched pure, and black ankle pants, faithfully as a uniform she’d assigned herself. Pearl earrings, a thin silver watch that she never let stop. She always smelled of gardenias—their scent would linger long after she left a room.

I was sixteen when my mother left my father, and consequently, me. She left us for a gardener, a man who supplied her flowers for many years. Someone who made things grow instead of uprooting and rearranging them and attempting to perfect them like my father. I found out first through the walls, before my parents told me; our drafty house was a theater for even the smallest sounds. I didn’t hear yelling or screaming, nor things thrown or broken; it sounded nothing like a permanent rupture in something that was supposed to be sacred, the way I thought it would. Instead, my parents talked for hours. My father wanted to know everything about the man—not just how it started between them, the sordid details of their dalliance, but who he was. What he desired, other than my mother. And my mother told him, as much as any person could tell the story of another’s life. It was all just bits and pieces, and I got even less of those bits and pieces than my father did, on virtue of the fact they were funneled to me through air vents. I tried my best to stitch together the fragments I received and conjured an internal image of a narrow-faced man with uneven eyes and patchy facial hair, shaded under a sun hat, until I realized I was only recalling Van Gogh’s painting “The Gardener.” The man would never become more real to me than that, a century-old portrait I had only seen once, shrunk and copied into the pages of a book.

I remember laying across my bed that day, sun strewn across me in my tower, and knowing my life would change after this moment, but not knowing exactly how, or how much. I climbed out onto the roof and tried to see the park, tried to see the path I had once tried to blaze, but it was spring then again, and I could not see through the trees and all their new leaves.

The day my mother finally left, she did not say goodbye, but in my room, she placed a bouquet of daffodils, the flower of forgiveness. I grew to understand that she was not asking for it; she was assuming it had already been granted.

My mother and the man moved away, began a new life together. She would send me postcards from her new home in the countryside, always writing, “Wish you were here!” I chose not to see her; she too became like a painting I had seen a picture of once, a portrait of a woman who was actually just a collection of thousands of tiny dots, whose figure became less and less clear the closer you looked.

I wished I was elsewhere, but not there. Here, there, elsewhere: it all became blurry. I lived more inside my head than anywhere else. The inside of my head became the inside of our old house. Its duplicate formed inside me, like the way I once thought desire did. I was safe there. Except at night, when all I could dream of was dead and dying flowers.

Sometimes I would try to smell my mother’s postcards, to see if I could smell gardenia. They always just smelled like paper, or ink, or nothing at all.

My father and I moved too, to a different city, where everything was new. We lived in a condominium, not even five years old, surely not haunted, in any sense of the word. I grew the rest of the way up there, against white dry-wall and on top of floor-to-floor carpets that softened all sound. There were no constellations on my new ceiling. My father filled the house with objects that had no purpose other than to offer focal points when we didn’t know where else to look—to just take up all the space gaping between us that we couldn’t seem to bridge, no matter how much either of us might have wanted to.

There were times where I thought I saw my mother in our new city, at the store or on the street—some elegant woman whose full face I could never see, but who would stride off with my mother’s sense of purpose, eyes fixed towards some destination, some desire I could not fully perceive from where I stood. Sometimes I would let myself follow her, for just a few moments, just until she disappeared from view. It was in these moments that I felt most alive, setting off on some path as if a journey was beginning, and for a few seconds, I would let myself believe one was. In this way, my mother’s desires overtook my own; in this way, they became my own. 

I went to college, at first to study botany. I thought I wanted to feel closer to plant life by assuming some sort of authority over it. But then I gave up trying to understand living things—a futile pursuit, I realized. I studied business; I worked in an office and went on afternoon coffee dates and accepted perfunctory gestures. Made a series of boxes to be checked and busied myself checking them.

Now, I’ve somehow become the age my mother was when she left us, and my mind still wanders to our old house, my bedroom tower. Like the way you’d think of a lover you’ve lost contact with: what were they doing now, and with whom? Did they love whoever it was more than they had loved you? I think of how I used to play he loves me, he loves me not, with all the forgotten flowers in our old house. How I would rip off petals one by one, debating the affections of some teenage crush, and when I had reached my conclusion, leave the petals there on the floor in some hidden corner of our home. The sight always made me think of a wedding procession that had passed on by, a ceremony that had already ended. 

On the windowsill of my apartment, there’s a vase of fresh flowers. Sometimes I still ask them questions as I look out through the glass of not the highest floor, but the one right below. All of the units in the building are exactly the same size, the same layout—reiterations of the same life. They are large enough for just one person. From my vantage point at the window, I can see the complex’s tree-lined driveway—an allée, it’s called, my father told me. The parallel lines that make up the driveway seem to get closer and closer to each other, appearing to almost touch, until they disappear completely from my sight. My father once said that lines create illusions in landscapes—like making us believe that things are closer than they really are, or that they go on forever.

Desire paths are sometimes called desire lines instead. When I look in the mirror, I can see lines all over my face, but they don’t seem to lead anywhere. My desires least of all. I see myself wilting—my life half-spent, and towards what? I think about how they say at infinity, even parallel lines will eventually meet, but neither my mother nor I will live forever. Maybe desire wouldn’t bloom in the same way if anyone did; maybe it wouldn’t exist at all. Maybe desire is circuitous, a closed loop around where it began, like how my path in the woods led back home as much as it led to the park. Maybe desire was like any other wild thing, something that could be enclosed and contained. Captured. Preserved.

For so long it had seemed impossible, but all I had to do was wake up one day and decide to go back. Decide that I was ready. I drove through a morning and then I was there, in the place that existed outside of the realm of my mind, with its own pulse distinct from the beating heart trapped inside of me.

Downtown resembled a kind of dream logic. Some places I remembered from my childhood had vanished entirely, the ones remaining somehow altered or transposed into others. Like my mother’s former floristry, which a part of me thought would remain vacant forever. Of course it wouldn’t, of course something else would sprout up there—my father’s favorite antique store had now set up shop. Instead of glass tables covered in my mother’s arrangements in an empty, chilly room, I looked through the windows and saw a clutter of odds and ends, clocks and armoires and hat stands and countless little trinkets whose only value is sentimental. A museum of the space-filling knick-knacks to which my father was so endeared. But somewhere in the storm of things lost to time, I could spot a vase of drooping gardenias, high up on a corner shelf, like my mother’s ghost still lingered there. A sight—a sign—that made me feel a sharp twist of emotions, like seeing the petals on the floor all those years ago.

I drove to my old neighborhood and found houses repainted, remodeled, lots split in half. All of it made me afraid to see my own home, so first I ventured to the park. It looked much the same as the way I remembered it: my mind’s postcard of that day with my father when he told me about desire paths. There was the fountain, the playground, the pond, the pavilion, the little dirt trails swooping off the cobblestone routes, desires woven into the grass. Desires of people I would never know. I thought of my own desire path, how it had grown over that winter, now so long ago—how I had not tried to retrod it the spring after my mother left. Now I wondered, was it that I was empty of desire then, or more full of it than ever?

I made my way to the edge of the park, where it seeped into the woods. Even without a path, I found I still knew the way through—found myself moving towards my home as if in a dream, as if in a memory, as if the past had become the present. 

On the other side of the woods, I found my house abandoned. Condemned, a sign on the door read. The exterior was covered in cascading ivy and vines, my father’s careful landscaping overgrown—weeds shooting up in between the cracks in the walkway, his meticulous shrubbery bursting out of its neatly trimmed shapes. The roof had sagged, collapsed entirely in some places. I could see my old bedroom had a hole gaping to the sky, laying open like an offering. 

I thought nothing of trespassing; I figured the house belonged to me just as much as it belonged to no one. And so I made my way through the overgrowth, broke the string of the Condemned sign, and let myself inside. 

I held my breath; I had been holding it for a long time. What was it, exactly, I wanted to find? Some relic of our living, a remnant of our family and our collective desires. Some piece of a trail that maybe could have hinted at our eventual digressions from the place we were all together, the shortcuts we made from then to now, from who we were and who we would become. 

Inside, the house was dark, and then suddenly light; the sun shone down in beams in the places where the roof had caved in, and then I saw the flowers everywhere. Not trapped dying in vases hidden away, but growing—on the walls, through the floorboards, on the ceilings. Roses across the windows, daisies up the stairs. Carnations in the closets, lilies on the shelves, sunflowers arching over the doorways. Ghostly whites to blood reds, silken petals and thorny stems, over every space that once lay empty. A blaze of daffodils in my old bedroom; a flush of gardenia in my mother’s office. Patches of orchids and lilies where I had littered petals all those years ago. All of them bursting and blooming in the darkness, like they used to on the insides of my eyelids before I went to sleep, but right in front of me, close enough to touch—impossible, but yet I tell you they were there. A garden had grown in the wake of our living, glorious and abundant. The flowers had dug their roots down through our pasts, reclaimed our home for their own.

They reached for me, they called to me. They said my name. Either they spoke my language, or I spoke theirs. It didn’t matter. I could hear them; we understood each other. They turned their faces towards me like I was the sun. I knew then that they had been waiting for me—all of my desires, growing and growing, alive there in the same place I had left them.