I’ve been wanting to upgrade to a paid subscription to Jeannine Ouellette’s “Writing in the Dark” Substack for awhile now, and was finally pulled to do so when she announced her current six-week intensive WANTED, which focuses on desire as a force in writing and in life.

Desire is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past year. It was one of the things that brought me back to therapy in January 2025. I’ve felt aimless for awhile. Both in life and in my writing. And one question that seems to keep me from moving toward anything is: what do I want?

So this felt like a fitting time to join “Writing in the Dark.”

Below is the “final” piece I wrote for Week 1: The Grammar of Longing. I say final in quotations because it’s simply the whittled down version I shared in the comments on the week one post.

(Want a little bonus content? I’ve shared the initial prose draft on my Patreon ! Available to both free and paid subscribers.)

Pelagic Longing

You engulfed me, buoyed
and choked me. Swayed me
swimmy in your languid gardens
sculptured with coral.
Did you embody the sea
turtle who swam at my side?
Far enough not to touch,
near enough to make out
the geometrics of its fins, catch
each other’s eye when we surfaced,
simultaneously, for air.

When you made me goddess
of boogie boards, and I kept mounting
your crests, out farther, in further—
did you mean to drown, or warn me? 

How quickly I dulled from the peach
of your abrasions when I uncloaked you 
from my skin, left with only a bottle
of your flesh, a shell too shallow
to hear you proper when pressed
against ear like nacre lip. I vowed
to explore the depths of you, throat
contracting around anticipation
the way it spasmed against your brine
at the back of my throat. 

We have so little choice at sixteen,
clam palms coated in drought dirt
and tied to land.

It’s been two decades since my father’s
riptide dragged me from your pull,
but some of you [





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