I’ve often felt in the past that that I would be a better person if I could free myself from my desires. After all, most great religions I’ve studied seem to imply that one of the first steps in attaining enlightenment is to free oneself from desire, particularly sexual desire.
As I’ve aged, in fact, I’ve comforted myself with the idea that as my sex appeal declined my desires also declined. Ideally, it seemed to me that the two would meet at the very point where pure enlightenment compensated for the fact that no woman in her right mind would even consider sleeping with me.
Recently, though, my doctor has begun to prescribe medicines that have completely killed what little sexual desire I had left, drugs meant to block male testosterone, as well as female hormones meant to further suppress a recently discovered cancer.
Unfortunately, enlightenment has not followed as swiftly as I had hoped. In fact, all I’ve been feeling lately is a strange sense of loss and self-alienation. Perhaps these are merely the first signs of enlightenment. If so, enlightenment may not be all I’ve wished it to be.
Such cunning fetters
freed from these desires
I long for their return.