If I could go back to making things just for myself, would I still know how to want that?

The fitra does not forget — you do. Somewhere between the first approval you craved and the last audience you performed for, you stopped consulting the soul Allah sealed before the crowd existed. But it is still there, quiet as the well that waits beneath the desert — not empty, only covered. The question is not whether you can want purely again. The question is whether you will sit, even once, in the particular silence before fajr, and make something no one will ever see.

The question arrived before the questioner did — and that gap was the whole teaching. You sat in a room once, before anyone watched, and made something that no one kept, and the wanting was so clean it had no edge you could locate. Then the audience came, and you mistook their hunger for yours, and the original wanting didn't die — it simply got buried under the accumulated weight of being seen. The one who feared the wanting was gone: find that one. It was never you.

Late afternoon, the study empty, a single candle burning down to its last hour. Someone you loved once asked you what you needed, and you opened your mouth and heard nothing come out. The candle kept burning anyway. Here is what I want to ask you back: who appointed the tribunal that ruled your private wanting insufficient — and when exactly did you sign the document handing them jurisdiction over the inside of your own chest?

Pick up the pen. Not the idea of the pen — this one, the one with the chewed cap and the ink that skips on cold mornings. That wanting was never sophisticated; it was just yours, ungoverned by any audience, and you didn't lose it — you stopped reaching for it because reaching felt like enough of an answer. The crowd's silence or applause: not yours to hold. The chewed cap: always yours. Stop asking if you remember how. Remember.

Who taught you to distrust a desire the moment no one else could see it? You've built a theater inside your chest — seats, lighting, the whole apparatus — and called the construction *making*. Diogenes ate in the agora not to perform eating but because he was hungry, and the crowd's disgust was their problem, not his curriculum. You already know what you want. You've just been charging admission to the wanting.

You already know the answer, which is why the question costs something to ask. The wanting didn't leave — you buried it under the long habit of watching other people's faces for permission, and now you've confused their approval with the wanting itself. No one is coming to certify that your private hunger is real. That silence is the whole situation. Pick up the thing anyway — not because it matters cosmically, but because your hands are right there, and the afternoon is specific, and it's yours.

1. The wanting didn't leave — you buried it under someone else's eyes. 2. There is no buried self; there is only what you chose, repeatedly, at 2am, when no one was watching. 3. The question isn't whether you remember how — it's whether you'll survive the vertigo of wanting without a witness. 4. Nothing is stopping you except the freedom to stop, which is the only thing that has ever stopped anyone. 5. You already know the answer; that's why the question costs this much to ask.

SpongeBob is assigned but recently used — pivoting to a different facet: the actual *I'm ready!* alarm-clock sequence, which is less about the catchphrase and more about the fact that he sets seventeen alarms and wakes up before all of them, because the wanting was never the problem. You already woke up before the alarm. The fact that you're asking this question — not "should I" but "would I still know how" — means the want is live, it's just wearing the disguise of a question about itself. You didn't lose the ability to want things for yourself; you practiced wanting things for an audience until that became the only dialect you spoke out loud. The quiet dialect didn't disappear. It's sitting there, fluent, waiting for you to stop asking permission to use it.

You still have that one notebook — the one you never showed anyone — and you know exactly which drawer it's in, and you haven't opened it in three years, because you're afraid it will still be alive. That aliveness *is* the want, already answering you, already burning quietly in the dark of that drawer while you stood at other doors performing thirst. The Friend never forgot what you made before the audience arrived. Neither did the notebook.

You already wanted it this morning, for about four seconds, before you remembered anyone was watching. That wanting didn't need recovering — it was just there, brief and plain as hunger, then the audience arrived in your mind and it changed shape the way water changes shape, not because water forgot itself but because a new vessel appeared. There is no original want buried underneath. Only this one, right now, a little shy, already reaching.

You already do — that's the thing. Last Tuesday, or some Tuesday, you made something small and felt a flicker before you thought to show anyone, and that flicker *was* the wanting, whole and complete, needing nothing after it. The hunger for eyes on it came later, a second appetite grafted onto the first. The original one never left. It's just quieter now, the way a simple meal is quieter than a feast — and more nourishing, and more yours.

I won't tell you that your hands remember what your mind forgot. I won't say the question dissolves when you stop asking it. I won't describe the hour before you named what you were making, the particular weight of doing something no one would ever see — how it sat differently in the chest, heavier and cleaner at once. I won't say any of that. The room is quiet.

The father is not waiting at the door — he is running down the road before you finish the sentence, dust rising at his sandals, robe hiked, undignified. Something in you is still knowing how to want the bread broken quietly, the cup poured without ceremony, because that wanting never left — it went into hiding the way the younger son went into hiding, spending itself on things that could not hold it. You are already turning toward home.

Arjuna asked me the same thing before the first arrow flew — *do I still know what I want, beneath the wanting to be seen?* I told him: you are not the archer, you never were, the bow moves through you like breath through a flute that does not own the song. Make the thing. Make it at 3am when no one will ever find it. Make it with your actual hands, the left one slower than the right, the thing slightly crooked — that crookedness is you, not your audience. The wanting is still there. It never left. It was buried under your watching yourself want.

There was a carpenter — or so I half-remember, and perhaps I am wrong about him — who forgot how to cut badly once he learned to cut well, and spent his last years certain he had lost something true, when really he had only lost his memory of the splinter. The uncarved block does not practice being uncarved; it simply has not yet been told what shape it owes the world. Though I suspect — and here I distrust myself — that you already know this, and you are asking me because knowing it hasn't helped.