Someday

This is not a bucket list. A bucket list assumes you will get to the bottom of it, and ranks the items by how likely that is; I have neither the confidence nor the ranking. These are things I would like to do, make, see, and become—some I could begin this weekend, some I will probably never reach—and I have stopped sorting them by which is which. Naming a want is not the same as scheduling it. Most of these I have wanted for years and said out loud to almost no one.

With my hands. I have spent most of my life in my head, and the parts of it I trust least are the ones that never touched anything. So: to cook, properly: not the assembling of fuel that gets me to the next thing, but a few dishes made well enough that someone else would want them. And to make something physical, the kind of thing that needs a class because you cannot read your way into it. I don’t know yet whether it is wood, or paper and thread, or clay. The appeal is exactly that it cannot be optimized: the hands learn at their own speed, and will not be hurried by an argument.

Arabic, the whole way down. I studied North Africa for years and read most of it in translation, which is a way of standing outside a house and describing the windows. I can manage in Arabic; I cannot yet live in it. I want the dialect the woman I am marrying thinks in—Tunisian Derja, its vowels swallowed, its French loanwords worn smooth—and the classical underneath it, the language of poems I have only met in someone else’s English. The afternoon I stumbled through a blessing I should have known, on the eve of Eid, and the man across from me left disappointed, I understood the size of the gap exactly. Fluency is not a credential I’m after. It is the difference between being told what was said and being in the room when it is said.

The four mountains. There are four books I have circled for years without climbing: Hegel’s Phenomenology, Heidegger’s Being and Time, the Futuhat of Ibn Arabi, al-Ghazali’s Revival. I do not want to have read them; that is a different and lesser want, the one that collects spines. I want to spend a season inside one, long enough that its sentences begin arriving in my own, the way a language does when you stop translating it. I have managed this only a handful of times, and each time it rearranged something. Breadth I have; breadth is the easy thing, and the homeless thing. What I am missing is the month that does not move on.

Stories, not arguments. Everything on this site is, in the end, an argument: it wants you to see something the way I have come to see it. I would like to make the other kind of thing. Short stories. Essays that are not trying to win. Two dreams in particular have been asking to be written for years—one from before a hard stretch of my life, one from inside it—and I have been afraid of them the way you are afraid of the work that matters. None of it would live here; this is where I think out loud, and the stories would be where I stop explaining and just make. I don’t know yet whether I can. That is part of why I want to.

The rest of what I want does not break into items, so I will not pretend it does.

I want a house. Not a portfolio of square footage, but a place with a door that is mine to open, where the two halves of my life can finally be in one room. I grew up in the flat grid of the Midwest, in a township surveyed into a perfect square before any settler arrived; I am marrying into another language, shared plates, and a city across an ocean. For years those halves have lived on separate continents, and the wanting has mostly been a wanting for them to touch. I want her to see the roads I came up on. I want a table where a Tunisian dish and a Midwestern one are set down without anyone explaining themselves.

I want a few people, kept for a long time. Not a network; the word makes me tired. What holds people together is the opposite of a transaction. I have spent years accumulating commitments and calling it a life; what I actually want is smaller and harder to get. A handful of friendships that outlast the season that made them. Family, the kind you choose and keep choosing. To be, for a few people, the one who notices.

There are places I want to stand in, too, a small number, held deeply rather than counted. I don’t yet know all of which they are. I have learned to distrust the list that grows for its own sake, and to trust the few that keep returning when I am not looking for them.

And underneath all of it, the inklings: the pulls I cannot yet argue for and will not pretend to. That the separateness of things is not the last word about them. That attention, given fully, is a kind of prayer, and might be answered. I don’t know what to do with these yet. I am not in a hurry to.

What I would like, in the end, is to become wise, and I notice I cannot say what that would take. Patience, maybe. Humility. The willingness to submit to something larger. Attention paid until it turns into something else. I can name the doors; I have not walked through them. If this whole page reduces to a single line, it is that one: I would like, someday, to become wise, and the wanting is the only part I am sure of.