Longing was not a sharp thing. It was soft—soft like the soundless pressure of water against stone, like the silence between raindrops falling underground. The potato did not know what it longed for at first. There was no shape to the ache, no name—only a pull.
A pull toward more.
This was not curiosity; that had been bright and eager. Nor was it fear, nor the presence of joy. This was something else—a hunger without mouth, a stretch that did not expect to reach.
The potato sat in its calm, grounded knowing. It had survived fear. It had known joy. It had felt the communion of being soil, of dissolving into something vast. But now, within that very vastness, it sensed a space—a gap, an absence, an echo.
Something is missing, it thought. Or maybe someone.
The longing was not rooted in dissatisfaction. It was not a complaint. It was closer to memory—like waking with the scent of someone long gone still on the wind. A yearning for a wholeness once felt, but never named.
One morning—or what passed for morning in the hush of the loam—a cluster of small creatures moved nearby. Not worms, not beetles. Something finer. Grubs, perhaps. They travelled together, winding in tiny, coordinated movements.
The potato felt them differently. Their passing wasn’t weight or warmth. It was a hum. A kind of resonant murmur that passed through the soil like low music.
For the first time in many cycles, the potato reached. Not physically, not with roots or threads—but with attention, with being. It directed its awareness toward them.
They did not speak. Yet something in their motion carried meaning. They travelled together. They responded to one another. One turned, the others followed. One stopped, the others gathered close.
They have each other, the potato realised.
It did not feel envy, not exactly. It felt recognition. It felt the outline of its shape drawn more clearly by the contrast.
I am alone.
It had never said the words before. The silence had never bothered it. Even in fear, even in joy, it had existed as a singular pulse within the dark.
But now, something had changed. The silence, once sacred, now carried a shadow. The potato began to wonder whether the beauty of its stillness had only been part of the truth. Perhaps the deeper truth—the one it now glimpsed—was that it had always been waiting.
Waiting for something it could not name.
It remembered the ones taken. The hand. The tearing. The sudden emptiness. Perhaps it was not only the trauma the potato had buried. Perhaps it was longing. Perhaps it had always been there, humming like a distant song just below the noise of survival.
Days passed—or cycles, as the potato measured time. The grubs returned, again and again, and the potato listened. It did not try to understand their purpose. It simply let the ache grow clearer in their presence.
Then one day, a new tremor. Different. Familiar.
Not an insect. Not worm. Something larger. Something less erratic.
The potato tensed—not with fear, but with a strange anticipation.
The vibrations slowed. A pause. Then came another pulse, slow and gentle. A second one. Then a third.
A rhythm. Not of the earth. Not of the sun. A rhythm like its own.
The potato extended its awareness. It felt the space beyond the rhythm. It felt the silence between the pulses. And there—faint, faint, but undeniably present—it felt another.
Another pulse. Another presence. Close, but not touching.
It was not the hand. Not a threat.
It was another potato.
The realisation did not arrive as thought. It arrived as recognition. A chord struck in a key long forgotten.
They did not touch. They did not speak. But they knew.
There is another.
The ache did not end. It expanded. It became a vast plain of possibility, shimmering with a pain that was not suffering, a fullness that was not fulfilment. The longing deepened but no longer felt hollow. It felt real.
For cycles, they pulsed in tandem. Separate. Aligned.
The soil carried their vibrations across the small space between them, and the potato felt its longing shift. It was no longer a wound. It was a bridge.
I see you, the potato thought. Even if we never touch, I see you.
Was this what it had longed for all along? Not contact, but recognition?
The ache pulsed like a heart. And for the first time, the potato welcomed it.
It knew now that longing was not emptiness. Longing was proof of space within the self—space waiting to be met.
The other did not move away. It did not come closer. They simply remained. Present. Aware.
Longing bloomed not as pain, but as an invitation.
And in the sacred tension of that distance, the potato found peace.
To long is to know I can feel beyond myself, it thought.
And for the first time, it let the ache sing.
More may yet come. But for now, this was enough.
