Lord, I Wanna Yearn

For the past few months, every time I opened Instagram, I was recommended new witty content about "yearning." Sometimes I saw a screenshot of a funny tweet or a presumably tongue-in-cheek blown out photo with sappy text overlayed. The images typically used that specific word: yearn. My algorithm is my algorithm—am I a yearner? I thought. What, exactly, does that mean? I'd share the memes with my friends, thinking they'd get it (whatever "it" was).

I was always the kid staring out of the window at school or drawing moons on my math worksheets—my mind occupied by an elsewhere, a dream of the past or a dream of the future. An only child, I learned to entertain myself through fantasy. And still, a single nostalgic smell out in the world can send me into a sentimental spiral for days. I've written crushes' (and exes') names on paper and slept with them under my pillow. When I moved out of an apartment and pulled my bedframe from the wall, there was a mound of forgotten slips of paper on the ground—memories of a wanting so intense, witchcraft seemed like the only viable solution.

And here people were, suddenly meme-ing the idea of yearning. It tickled me. There was something here. Yearn. It's something more romantic or plaguing than longing. I responded to the melodrama of the word. My nostalgia, fixations, wanting, and thrumming inner world were more common than I'd realized. (That's the nice and not-so-nice thing about the internet—it seems to point one towards others with similar sensibilities, good or bad.)