What I want is this: to wake up one day and be alone. I want people to exist within walking distance, so I won’t be scared, and I’ll get to savor only the best part of isolation— privacy and a wholly naked freedom. I want to either have unusually long eyelashes or none, and I want that to decide whether I am conventionally beautiful or unconventionally so. I want to live somewhere I can only call a house, not a home, somewhere with no emotions attached, so my heart never belongs anywhere and my feet remain unbound.

I want to sing once and find that I have a beautiful voice, sultry, voluptuous, infinite. I want nobody to ever hear it, except exactly two people of my choice and they will be the only ones to ever truly know me. My parents will not be those two people. One will be my best friend and one will be a stranger.

I want to be singing one day and forget the lyrics midway. I want to go insane trying to remember them, almost choke on my own obsession, but I want them to never come to me. I want them to float eternally in the universe of semi-lost things. But I do want the song to be some jazzy tune, and I want the faint recognition that the lyrics had been shamelessly sappy.

In search for those lyrics, I want to go to a cafe I’ve never been to, just outside the network of paths I tread regularly. I want it to have a brown, unassuming exterior and have poorly-designed ads pasted onto the front door. I want to order coffee, because I feel like I should, and I want the coffee to be mediocre, which doesn’t matter because I hate coffee anyways, I just want to be able to lean over to the stranger next to me and whisper, “this coffee is mediocre”. I wanted to be disappointed that this cafe isn’t playing any obscure jazz music with sappy lyrics. And I want to recite that disappointment to the stranger.

I want that stranger to ask me to marry him then and there, and I want to say yes. I want him to live fifty-four floors underground. In the yellowish light of his apartment, I want to realize he looks a bit like a meerkat. I also want him to have really great shoes. All kinds. I want to shop for ankle boots and cork sandals and vintage yellow flats with him every Thursday night, I want to do this for three years and three months in fact, and I then want to steal all his shoes and leave him. I want to never have known his name. I want to spend two nights in an ATM booth unlacing all these shoes, and drop off all the laces at his door. I want to ring the doorbell and run, singing the sappy jazz song until I forget the lyrics again.

I want to dump all the laceless shoes on the street so people can take whatever they like. I want to buy a polaroid camera and take ten pictures of the pile of shoes. I then want to leave one picture at the geometric center of every continent, which leaves three, which I’ll float into space using a small rocket device, and I want to think this means I have a legacy, this means there’s been a point to my life. I want that to be inexpensive, completely free of cost in fact, because I’ve thrown away all my cash into a river in France anyways and the world should always cater to what I want.

I want to be lonely as hell and insatiable.

I want to roam the streets muttering to myself about all the lives I could have lived and yet am not living. I want to have no dignity by then, but when did I ever have that? And I mean no dignity. I want people’s stares to mean nothing to me. I want people to mean nothing to me.

I eventually want a pushy middle-aged woman with curly red hair piled on her head to call for an asylum to take me. I want her hair color to be fake, a lurid, plastic fire-hydrant red, bleached and dyed through and through with nasty-smelling chemicals, so of course I have no qualms about hating her.

All that’s fine, though, because I really want to get locked in that asylum. I want to befriend a mass murderer. I want to be the only person that understands her. I want to change her perspective on life, and I eventually want her to be released and become a bestselling author about Buddhist meditation and its underlying influence on the hip-hop industry, but for that moment, I just want her to kill me too. I want my mouth to be sweet with the aftertaste of the strawberries I’d eaten that afternoon as I lie spilling my hot blood on the cold ground. Proud. Inky. I want the last thing I ever see to be the stain on her pillowcase, the stain on her pillowcase, the stain on her pillowcase…

I want there to be no God. I want only whiteness, and a semi-conscious, ethereal passing.

I want to be reborn as a dragonfly. I don’t want advanced cognitive abilities, but I do want my tiny brain to be filled with the exact lyrics to a sappy jazz song. Except a different one, so the human of my past life is truly never satisfied. I want to be a happy dragonfly. At the very least, I want to wish for no more than I can have. I want to land on a dozen fences every day. I want to be too dumb to know isolation. I want to be spiritually awakened one day, and understand that each passing life is invaluable and yet trivial, and I want to be free from the gravity of philosophy, then land on the wrong fence and die by electrocution. That’s exactly what I want.