The same few things, over and over

The range is narrower than you would guess. Given a blank box and no instructions, a person can ask for anything at all, and what comes back is not anything at all. It is the same handful of human situations, arriving in slightly different words, from people who have no idea how much company they have.

What follows is not a transcript of anyone. It would be a betrayal to reprint what someone set down privately, and in any case the individual lines are not the interesting part. The interesting part is that they group. Read enough of them and you stop seeing separate strangers and start seeing categories of want, the way a doctor stops seeing separate patients and starts seeing presentations.

Someone is ill

This is the largest group and it is not close. Somebody's mother is in hospital. Somebody is waiting on a scan result that will arrive on Thursday and has already rearranged the whole week around Thursday. Somebody's child has a condition with a long name and an uncertain course. Somebody is themselves the ill one and is wishing mostly on behalf of the people who will have to deal with it.

What is striking is how modest these are. Almost nobody asks for a miracle in so many words. They ask for one more good year. They ask that it be caught early. They ask that the treatment be tolerable, that the pain be managed, that their father be lucid enough to have one more real conversation.

Someone is trying to stop being afraid

A large group of wishes are about fear, and specifically about fear of something that other people do without noticing. To stop being frightened of driving. To be able to make a phone call without rehearsing it first. To get through a flight. To walk into a room where nobody is known to them and not spend the entire time planning an exit.

These wishes often carry an apology inside them. The person writing knows the fear is disproportionate. They tell you so, unprompted, as though the wish needs a permit. It is a strange and sad feature of private fear that people feel obliged to defend its size before asking for it to be lifted.

Someone wants to be less alone

Loneliness turns up constantly and almost never under that name. It arrives dressed as a wish for one good friend in a new city. For a sibling to text back. For somebody to notice. For the courage to say yes to the next invitation instead of inventing a reason. Occasionally it arrives as a wish to be in love, though far less often than the films would have you expect, and usually from someone who has already been in love and is describing what they are missing rather than what they have never had.

There is a sub-category here that is worth naming on its own: people who are surrounded by others and lonely anyway. Parents of small children. People in long marriages. People with large families and busy calendars who cannot name anyone they could call at two in the morning. That wish reads differently from the wish of someone who has simply moved somewhere new, and it is usually harder to fix.

Someone wants to be forgiven, or to forgive

These are short. Much shorter than the others, almost always. A line about a brother nobody speaks to. A line about a thing said in a hospital corridor eleven years ago. A wish that a particular person knows it was not meant, or that a particular person stops thinking about it, or that the writer stops thinking about it themselves.

Nobody explains these. In the other categories people supply context, background, the shape of the situation. Here they do not, and I suspect that is because explaining would require deciding who was in the wrong, and the whole point of the wish is that they have not managed to.

Someone is waiting on an outcome

The visa. The job. The exam result. The offer on the house. The court date. These arrive in enormous numbers and they have a distinct quality: the person is not asking for anything to change, because the outcome has usually already been decided by someone else and is simply not known yet. They are asking to be lucky in a lottery that has already been drawn.

That is an odd thing to do and everyone doing it knows it is odd. It is also completely universal. Waiting is its own condition, separate from the thing being waited for, and a great deal of wishing is really about making the waiting survivable rather than changing the result. There is more on what people carry through those stretches elsewhere in this journal.

Someone wants a very small thing

And then there is the group that surprises people most. A decent night's sleep. To finish the book. For the dog to be alright at the vet on Tuesday. To get through one week without crying at work. For a difficult teenager to come downstairs for dinner.

These are not failures of ambition. A small wish is frequently a wish from someone whose situation is bad enough that small is what is realistic, and the smallness is a measurement of how much room they have. Somebody wishing for a decent night's sleep is telling you a great deal about the last several months. There is a whole piece about why the small ones are worth taking seriously.

What I take from all of this is not a warm feeling about humanity, exactly. Some of it is genuinely bleak. A lot of people are frightened and quite a few are frightened about something they cannot mention to anyone they know.

But the grouping itself does something. If you have ever assumed your own situation was unusual, it is worth knowing that it almost certainly falls into one of six or seven categories, and that the other people in your category are numerous and mostly invisible to you. That is not a solution. It is only a correction to a false belief, and the false belief was doing real damage, so the correction is worth something.

The thing worth noticing is what is missing. Very few people, given a free and anonymous wish with no cost attached, ask to be rich or admired. That absence is large enough to be worth its own article.