The Longing

There is always a dull longing that goes unlabelled and hangs a layer or two below a joy, a pang somewhere in the soul that can't be coughed up or cut out, just endured. A nonsense to the skeptic, no more than perhaps a twitch of an evolutionary relic left unemployed within the brain, now ossified into an irritant jumping across the boundaries of our troubled sleep. Whatever its origin, it's always there be it a hollow left in our psyche from an umbilical when severed by God or a buffering problem in our brain, the longing never leaves. We try and quench it with beauty, love, art and myth but it remains unfulfilled, as if a speck of the infinite resides within us all, that can absorb everything we have and then ask for more.