wildscape. literary journal

Confession Under Melatonin
by Holly Coleman

I am always longing. That sounds dramatic but it isn’t, not really. 

Last night I swallowed two chalky melatonin tablets, the cheapest ones on the shelf, not because I wanted sleep but because I wanted dreams. Or just to remember them. Dreams at least pretend to mean something. I thought maybe I’d encounter a wolf in my kitchen or a dead friend at the foot of my bed, something jagged enough to spend the morning decoding. Instead I woke at 3am with my daughter’s plastic horse jammed under my shoulder. If it had been a dream I could have spun it into metaphor. Awake, it was just plastic. Still, I stared at it for too long, waiting for it to reveal itself. That’s what longing does. It convinces you even junk might eventually confess truth.

The truth is, I think I could live without sex. I could not live without longing. 

Sex is a receipt: proof of purchase, timestamped, already fading. Desire is the menu, the appetite, the saliva pooling under your tongue before anything hits the table. Longing is refusing to order so the wanting never ends, even if it means starving on purpose. Some would call that masochism, as if refusal were always self-punishment. They’d be wrong. Eroticism isn’t in the act. It’s in the refusal, the suspension, the chokehold of not taking what you want even when it’s offered to you. That isn’t masochism. It’s survival. The hunger insists you keep moving, keep thinking, keep noticing.

This morning the sky was the color of a held bruise. Proof a body has been touched, changed. But a bruise is also transient; it slides from purple to sickly yellow until no one sees it anymore. After I dropped my kids off at school I wrote this down, a refusal of disappearance. This is the only preservative I know.

Longing sharpens me to ridiculous degrees. In class I cross my legs tighter when the professor stares too long, as if that gesture could conduct or contain the current. In the grocery store I flush when a stranger brushes past, and then I laugh at myself for turning aisle seven into an erotic experiment. These are not encounters with desire but with static. The body as antenna, humming before the circuit closes. Humiliating. Holy.

On my desk: a feather found on the sidewalk, grey and limp; a candle stub; the melatonin bottle; yesterday’s receipt; the plastic horse. None of it is sacred. Put trash in a line and something happens. The objects begin to vibrate in relation to each other. Longing animates the useless. It’s not romantic. It’s instrumental. Arrangement is practice, training attention. I know how deranged that sounds. But I also know it works.

Poetry is the most convincing evidence I have that longing generates. A line break is a lover pulling away; enjambment is a gasp caught in the chest. Sonnets are locked rooms where the point is not to escape but to press against the walls. I write so I can ache without dissolving. So I can touch without touching. The page is the perfect wall. Fulfillment kills. Form sustains.

Keats knew that too. He lived in a small house with just a thin wall between him and Fanny Brawne. If you’ve ever lived in a shitty apartment then you know he must have heard her on the other side: the rustle of her dress, her voice in laughter, the scrape of her chair. That was the geography of his desire. Not her body, but the wall. He wrote the great odes in that atmosphere—swollen with ache, luminous with what he could not have. Maybe sometimes they touched. Maybe more. Maybe they were fucking, quietly, urgently, in ways history has no record of. But even if they did, the poems are charged not by the act but by the not-having, the proximity without possession. The urn, the nightingale, melancholy itself—those are the bruises, the shapes longing took when it bled through the wall.

It’s embarrassing how often I think of this: Keats at his writing desk, Fanny humming in the next room, that hum seeping through the wall until it mutated into meter. The night’s domestic noise transforming into lyric, longing becoming architecture. Resistance writing itself into form.

I’m not attempting to glamorize suffering. Pain flattens. Longing sharpens. Longing is methodical. You do not collapse into satisfaction; you circulate around it until you can translate the orbit. Keats practiced that orbit. I practice it in miniature—my feather, my bruise-sky, the cheap horse. Small rituals of attention that keep me circling.

Sometimes the discipline turns literal. I take melatonin the way others do rituals—little, deliberate provocations meant to change register. I want the unconscious to cough up scraps I didn’t know I needed. Dreams hand you fragments you wouldn’t compose consciously. One night I dreamed I was standing in a river holding an extension cord; sparks laced the water and I laughed because I wanted to know how close to ruin I could go without burning. Another night someone told me they loved me without moving their mouth. I woke with that sentence lodged in my throat—small, toxic, but still thrilling. 

This is why I keep the shrine of scraps, why I drag myself to the cheap altar of chemical sleep, why I record the color of an ink-blotted sky on the back of a receipt. It is not superstition. It is an economy. Invest attention into the almost, and the almost becomes usable. Eroticism, in this account, is not collapse; it is stored pressure. It is refusal converted into leverage. It is the air between rooms, the hum that passes through plaster, the electricity you can learn to harvest.

Here’s the knife-twist: The wall between people does not keep desire inside boxes; it leaks. Keats made the leaking work for language. He turned overheard domestic sound into public poetry. That move is both petty and revolutionary. Take the private ache, translate it, publish it, let the not-having become communal. The effect is radical because it refuses the privatization of feeling. You do not own your ache; you broadcast it, and others receive it. They hear their own pulse in your lines and map it back to themselves.

Sex finishes the sentence. Longing writes another one. Sex is an ending. Longing is fuel. Keats at his desk, the stranger in aisle seven, my professor, me—all of us soldered into the same circuit. We feed off each other’s lack, and in feeding, we make something that outlasts an orgasm, or a receipt, or a bruise.

There isn’t an answer. Only the dangling clause, the hum that leaks through walls, the ache churning into language. I want to say that’s enough. It never is.

about the author // Holly Coleman