Briefly, I saw someone’s desire for that line. The fleeting moment of a body choosing to take a particular path — one that’s rendered visible because other bodies chose to take it too.
JANUARY 27
Desire paths or desire lines refer to human-made trails incidentally carved by people walking through a particular path repeatedly over time. They’re called ‘desire paths’ because they represent the preferred routes people choose to take over the otherwise marked or planned routes of, say, a sidewalk: concrete neatly laid out for use but rejected for lack of efficiency, suddenly a paradox of modernity. Desire paths become starkly visible against sidewalks — a skinny strip of dry dirt in the middle of grass, like the parting of hair on a scalp — because of erosion and wear over time and because enough people choose the desire path over the sidewalk or the preset path.
Desire lines are like the antihero to the poorly-planned concrete drags of sidewalks. Desire lines represent autonomy and will, choice over dictate. In a way, they are the physical, visual manifestation of a certain desire, choosing to move in space in one direction and not the other: a material remnant of embodied desire.
JANUARY 28
If you opened me up, you would find desire lines of text running up and down my spine. Instead of vertebrae, you would find words holding me together, propping me upright.
FEBRUARY 3
Desire lines are an accountable phenomenon because of the (almost comical) stark contrast against the paved path beside the desire line, which renders the desire line that much more noticeable. But is this the only reason we know they’re there? Without the visibility, the terrestrial inscription, would we still know about or imagine desire lines? Surely they would still exist in theory.
Are there desire lines in the sky? Individual pilots can’t simply decide to pave their own air paths against global airline routes preordained by forces of aviation on which flights all over the world depend. The slightest veer off the designated path could potentially send the entire system into chaos.
And what about unmanned aircrafts? Do drones or missiles create desire lines? In missile guidance, Wikipedia tells me, the ‘line of sight’ is the line directly between point A, the structure that holds the missile during launching, and point B, the target. Once it’s launched, the (invisible) line of sight guides the missile to fly a straight path toward the target. Perhaps a kind of desire path.
Birds follow certain desire lines in some ways too. Migration patterns, routes of flight instinctually pursued, mark a kind of desire path that birds follow over time.
Even if there are desire lines in the sky, they wouldn’t exist in the same way they exist on land. Desire lines are invisible in the sky — or, if not invisible, they are at least ephemeral. I wish we could see them in the same way we can see desire paths in terrain. What would the sky look like then?
FEBRUARY 14
She is my desire path, and all my desire lines run through her.
FEBRUARY 25
There’s an entire subreddit (r/DesirePath) dedicated to photos of desire paths around the world, perfectly titled “On the Beaten Trail,” and its description reads: “Dedicated to the paths that humans prefer, rather than the paths that humans create.” Users post photos of desire lines found in Turkey, the Netherlands, Japan, Portugal, Chicago, Los Angeles, Germany, New York, Ireland, Texas, Australia, France.
But they essentially all look the same, following a consistent formula. There’s some diversity, sure, but they pretty much all take the same form. There’s typically a grassy area near a sidewalk and then a thin, dirt road clearly forged through the grass, like a sliver of the earth’s flesh revealed in the middle of a sea of green.
But apparently it can appear in the middle of a gravel road too, like this one in Japan:
The desire paths of these countries present themselves to me like this. I scroll through the posts for what feels like hours, trying to visually collect as many different desire paths as I can, each one a link in the virtual desire line I follow digitally.
MARCH 11
As I’ve been thinking about desire paths and clicking through so many pictures of them online, I wondered: Why have I not yet noticed any desire lines around when I’m out walking? Then finally, it happened.
Today I saw a desire path on campus. I was walking my usual path from the parking lot to the building that houses the English department at my university when a guy on his bike came barreling down the sidewalk, nearly grazing my side as he zipped by me. He was going pretty fast. When he passed me on the path and biked ahead, I saw him veer off of the sidewalk, and there it was. A desire line. Small and easy to miss, but it was there. And I saw the guy bike directly through it. I saw him actually use the desire line! It all happened so quickly. He traced the line perfectly with his bike. It was amazingly precise. It was like the veil was lifted on the phenomenon of desire lines for a moment, and I got a brief glimpse into the making of the line. Briefly, I saw someone’s desire for that line. The fleeting moment of a body choosing to take a particular path — one that’s rendered visible because other bodies chose to take it too.
Desire paths may be visible, but we don’t always notice them. I take that path from the parking lot to the English department at least twice a week every week since I’ve been going to school here, and today was the first time I’ve ever noticed that particular desire path.
MARCH 21
Can a line of writing resemble a desire line? With the writer like the walker?
A desire path is marked by bodies moving in the same direction. It’s a physical manifestation of the choice to take one route over another. Writing, too, is a physical representation — in this case, through inscription on the page rather than on the earth or in the grass. Writing is a visual, tangible representation of the body’s movement toward a desire of the mind, of expression, language, and signification.
First, my hand reaches for the pen. Then, it takes the pen to the page. As my arm unfurls from my shoulder, it stretches out into a kind of line, reaching. My fingers, too, unfold to aim the pen, press a point on the page, and begin following another line: the sentence etched as a result of the lines of desire flowing from my body.