𝗟𝗜𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗔𝗥𝗬: “The Wilting Fig Tree” by Lara Marie De Leon

Published by: Aprilyn Sado

Date Published: December 25, 2024

Time Published: 4:09 PM

Category: Prose

Theme: The desire to be everything all at once

There are still so much—in general. An endless string of possibilities stretches before me. So many instruments I’m dying to play—languages to learn, songs to hear, people to meet, foods to taste, places to visit, stories to write, lives to live.

Every corner of my world screams with things I have yet to explore. Each and every one of them calls upon me, begging for me to reach out. I fear I desire more than I act upon; my brain is forever filled with dreams of where I could go or who I might become.

And yet, after all the dreaming, I still wait. Stuck in this dark, tight space between wanting to be and my relentless pursuit of becoming. I push myself over the edge, working towards trying to 𝘣𝘦 rather than actually 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨—as if truly living requires some sense of perfection that I have yet to achieve.

I believe it’s my strange, consuming obsession with searching for meaning. My desire to understand why I am here and what I am meant to do. That might be what fuels my will to still be here: to find meaning. And to find it in a way that feels undeniably true.

I desire to have it—violently, even desperately—yet I am always at a wait, waiting with a gnawing impatience that slowly fills my chest. It’s a growing fire, both warm and merciless, pushing me forward as it keeps me still. I imagine all the things I can be—all the lives I’ll touch, the beauty I’ll gather—but it stays in this wide realm of anticipation, forever out of reach.

And of course, I wait, feeling every second pass, filled with the urgency of wanting but frozen by the fear of moving too soon or not moving in the right direction.

In this tension, I wonder if perhaps this state of waiting, wanting, and reaching is its own kind of being. Maybe I am already as alive as I will ever be in this in-between place. Maybe in some strange way, this is the meaning—this longing, this desire to see, to learn, to know. It’s as if by reaching for all things at once, I find myself connected to it all, tethered to life in all its possibilities.

And maybe, in the end, the waiting and the wanting are simply part of the journey toward being fully here, truly human, truly alive.