Consider: Longing

Some fall in love as easily as taking a breath. Others must be slowly worn down by love: their jadedness and trauma eroded by persistent affection.

Others still, may never fall in love, even if they want it more than anything in the universe.

This pillar of desire cannot be taken lightly. It can't be brute forced, negotiated with, or driven by pure logic. It may be the most dangerous kind of desire. Volatile. Breathless. Incalculably exhilarating and abysmally soul crushing.

And all things adjacent to it, the things that spring from longing, exist as scions of chaos within the most stalwart of us. Romance. Loyalty. Camaraderie. Jealousy. Lust. A desire for that which we do not have, or that which others have, or a blind desperation to keep something that was never ours to hold captive in the first place.

We are characters, all of us, not so different from those in novels. There is no telling how we might react to our longings. The terrible, admirable lengths we might go to pursue them. The quest for unbridled affection, the obsession of the sexual ideal, or the friend who feels closer than any lover ever could.

Even I, the author, can't guess how my characters might navigate these intricacies. This particular flavor of desire is unstable at best, though always present to some degree.

But never will I push such things upon them: no. That would destroy everything. The author is not a matchmaker, and those who are, become matchmakers and nothing else: rising from the ashes of dead characters who exist only to present drama and emotional whimsy.

For we do not exist only for longing, though we long much. We long for what we wish we had, or had but lost, but longing does not, MUST NOT define us. Lest it destroy us.

The character, too, will be filled with longing, but they must not be conceived by its wiles solely, or they are caricatures only.

For we are all more than the sum of our various lusts, though we lust with great fervency. None of us are ever more human than when the burning pain and ecstasy of pining for another courses through our very marrow.