Rooms of our own

Longing is not synonymous with lacking, though the world teaches us to treat it as such. In fact, yearning is a kind of fire – an elemental spark that keeps us alive when everything else feels grey. Enduring the years I have, I’ve begun to think of longing as alchemy – the transformation of desire into fantasy, a glimmer that can sustain us, a fire too far out of reach to burn our fingers.

In myth, the twin flame is not just romance; it is recognition. The Greeks told these stories as explanations for desire that felt too great for the body to contain. Plato wrote of souls severed, endlessly seeking reunion. It is an idea that has travelled across centuries — sometimes dismissed as folly, sometimes experienced as truth. And yet in the quiet moments, when longing burns low and steady – don’t we all know this feeling? – the sense that someone is both mirror and flame. That love is not merely about being seen, but about being known.

It should be noted that alchemy is not easy work. To yearn is to endure the ache without trying to extinguish it. It is to sit in the fire long enough for it to reshape you. When Persephone descends into the underworld, she is not destroyed by her hunger for more than the surface world. She is remade by it.

Longing is not weakness. It is a compass, a teacher and sometimes a wound that refuses to close. To deny it is to live half a life. To tend to it – to let it sharpen our days and stretch our imagination – is something else entirely. The work of the romantic, the spell of the alchemist. After all, we’ve never lived without fire and we aren’t destined to.