Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  What’s the matter with you that you can’t go along and make it yourself? When we were first married you always made my omelettes yourself. I won’t eat yellow froth with a few strings of parsley in it—it reminds me of the dog when he’s sick, it’s disgusting! And I won’t go on talking about it either, the next time it happens I’ll sack the cook. Damn it all, you were glad enough of my help when I found you practically starving in New York—but now you’re for ever racing off with that girl. It’s all this damned animal’s fault that you met her!’ He would kick out sideways at the terrified Tony, who had lately been made to stand proxy for Stephen. But worst of all was it when Ralph started weeping, because, as he said, his wife did not love him any more, and because, as he did not always say, he felt ill with his painful, chronic dyspepsia. One day he must make feeble love through his tears: ‘Angela, come here—put your arms around me—come and sit on my knee the way you used to. His wet eyes looked dejected yet rather greedy: ‘Put your arms around me, as though you cared—’ He was always insistent when most ineffectual. That night he appeared in his best silk pyjamas—the pink ones that made his complexion look sallow. He climbed into bed with the sly expression that Angela hated—it was so pornographic. ‘Well, old girl, don’t forget that you’ve got a man about the house; you haven’t forgotten it, have you?’ After which followed one or two flaccid embraces together with much arrogant masculine bragging; and Angela, sighing as she lay and endured, quite suddenly thought of Stephen. 2 Pacing restlessly up and down her bedroom, Stephen would be thinking of Angela Crossby—haunted, tormented by Angela’s words that day in the garden: ‘Could you marry me, Stephen?’ and then by those other pitiless words: ‘Can I help it if you’re—what you obviously are? ’ She would think with a kind of despair: ‘What am I in God’s name—some kind of abomination?’ And this thought would fill her with very great anguish, because, loving much, her love seemed to her sacred. She could not endure that the slur of those words should come anywhere near her love. So now night after night she must pace up and down, beating her mind against a blind problem, beating her spirit against a blank wall—the impregnable wall of non-comprehension: ‘Why am I as I am—and what am I?’ Her mind would recoil while her spirit grew faint. A great darkness would seem to descend on her spirit—there would be no light wherewith to lighten that darkness. She would think of Martin, for now surely she loved just as he had loved—it all seemed like madness.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Maybe I could have two lives. Maybe I could be with Theo and also go to group. I had been avoiding them, thinking that the two could not coexist. But what if they could? Why couldn’t I, then, stay in Los Angeles? I could get a job at a library or something. I could live somewhere on the beach in a little bungalow, if cheap bungalows still existed. I could be a woman who didn’t kill herself over her problems, but triumphed. I would be balanced, a measured human being. There wouldn’t have to be any more sadness. I would have love and sanity. Or, like Claire, would I just keep getting worse? It was so hard to reconcile fantasy with reality. It was hard to believe that something as beautiful as the way Theo made me feel could put me in the hospital or kill me. Did chasing the light inevitably lead us here? If we didn’t chase the light, did people like us just end up here anyway? If Claire had never left her marriage, where would she be now? She said that she was depressed during her marriage and ended up here once before. And that was before she began her odyssey of love and sex. If you were just going to end up here, regardless of what you did, it seemed worth it to really push things like she did. The nothingness was going to eat you alive anyway. It was going to be mashed potatoes at the end no matter what. So why not just grab for whatever you could get? —“Well, I’ve really mucked it up this time,” said Claire. “I’m back in group therapy now, only here with a pack of sad arses who are completely catatonic—which is maybe actually better.” She laughed. It was good to see her sense of humor back. Her hair was still greasy, piled on top of her head, but the circles under her eyes had diminished and there was a glint in her eyes again. “You seem better,” I said. “Like you’re not just staring at the wall.” “Yes, with my last suicide attempt I woke up completely miffed that I was still alive. But this one was oddly refreshing. Maybe I just needed some sort of sorbet—a life palate cleanser.” My God, I loved her. “I get it,” I said. “I mean, not really, because mine wasn’t really a consciously active attempt.” “No, yours was more of a gesture.” “Exactly, a gesture. I’m not the suicide pro that you are. But I think I understand.” “Love, if I were a pro I wouldn’t be here.” “Right,” I said. “But I mean I’m not as, like, experienced with suicide or whatever. Like it’s not as much a part of my oeuvre. I’m more—I don’t know what I am actually. But I know what you mean by a palate cleanser. Sometimes everything is just so bleh that you need to fucking cut it with a knife.”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  afford an argument against the theory of the divine institution and vicarial prerogatives of the papacy which the doubtful exegesis of our Lord’s words to Peter ought not to be allowed to counteract. If we leave out all the wicked popes of the 9th and 10th centuries, forget for a moment the cases of Honorius and other popes charged with heresy, and put aside the offending popes of the Renaissance period and all the bulls which sin against common reason, such as Innocent VIII.’s bull against witchcraft, Alexander is enough to forbid that theory. Could God commit his Church for 12 years to such a monster? It is fair to recognize that Catholic historians feel the difficulty, although they find a way to explain it away. Cardinal Hergenröther says that, Christendom was delivered from a great offence by Alexander’s death, but even in his case, unworthy as this pope was, his teachings are to be obeyed, and in him the promise made to the chair of St. Peter was fulfilled (Matt. 23:2, 3). In no instance did Alexander VI. prescribe to the Church anything contrary to morals or the faith, and never did he lead her astray in disciplinary decrees which, for the most part, were excellent."822 In like strain, Pastor writes:823 In spite of Alexander, the purity of the Church’s teaching continued unharmed. It was as if Providence wanted to show that men may injure the Church, but that it is not in their power to destroy it. As a bad setting does not diminish the value of the precious stone, so the sinfulness of a priest cannot do any essential detriment either to his dispensation of her sacraments or to the doctrines committed to her. Gold remains gold, whether dispensed by clean hands or unclean. The papal office is exalted far above the personality of its occupants, and cannot lose its dignity or gain essential worth by the worthiness or unworthiness of its occupants. Peter sinned deeply, and yet the supreme pastoral office was committed to him. It was from this standpoint that Pope Leo the Great declared that the dignity of St. Peter is not lost, even in an unworthy successor. Petri dignitas etiam in indigno haeredo non deficit." Leo’s words Pastor adopts as the motto of his history. In such reasoning, the illustrations beg the question. No matter how clean or unclean the hands may be which handle it, lead remains lead, and no matter whether the setting be gold or tin, an opaque stone remains opaque which is held by them. The personal opinion of Leo the Great will not be able to stand against the growing judgment of mankind, that the Head of the Church does not commit the keeping of sacred truth to wicked hands or confide the pastorate over the Church to a man of unholy and lewd lips.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In the meantime the feelings of the Anagnese underwent a change. The adherents of the Gaetani family rallied their forces and, combining together, they rescued Boniface and drove out the conspirators. Seated at the head of his palace stairway, the pontiff thanked God and the people for his deliverance. "Yesterday," he said, "I was like Job, poor and without a friend. To-day I have abundance of bread, wine, and water." A rescuing party from Rome conducted the unfortunate pope to the Holy City, where he was no longer his own master.25 A month later, Oct. 11, 1303, his earthly career closed. Outside the death-chamber, the streets of the city were filled with riot and tumult, and the Gaetani and Colonna were encamped in battle array against each other in the Campagna. Reports agree that Boniface’s death was a most pitiable one. He died of melancholy and despair, and perhaps actually insane. He refused food, and beat his head against the wall. "He was out of his head," wrote Ptolemy of Lucca,26 and believed that every one who approached him was seeking to put him in prison. Human sympathy goes out for the aged man of fourscore years and more, dying in loneliness and despair. But judgment comes sooner or later upon individuals and institutions for their mistakes and offences. The humiliation of Boniface was the long-delayed penalty of the sacerdotal pride of his predecessors and himself. He suffered in part for the hierarchical arrogance of which he was the heir and in part for his own presumption. Villani and other contemporaries represent the pope’s latter end as a deserved punishment for his unblushing nepotism, his pompous pride, and his implacable severity towards those who dared to resist his plans, and for his treatment of the feeble hermit who preceded him. One of the chroniclers reports that seamen plying near the Liparian islands, the reputed entrance to hell, heard evil spirits rejoicing and exclaiming, "Open, open; receive pope Boniface into the infernal regions." Catholic historians like Hergenröther and Kirsch, bound to the ideals of the past, make a brave attempt to defend Boniface, though they do not overlook his want of tact and his coarse violence of speech. It is certain, says Cardinal Hergenröther,27 "that Boniface was not ruled by unworthy motives and that he did not deviate from the paths of his predecessors or overstep the legal conceptions of the Middle Ages." Finke, also a Catholic historian, the latest learned investigator of the character and career of Boniface, acknowledges the pope’s intellectual ability, but also emphasizes his pride and arrogance, his depreciation of other men, his disagreeable spirit and manner, which left him without a personal friend, his nepotism and his avarice. He hoped, said a contemporary, to live till "all his enemies were suppressed."

• From The Pisces (2018)

  “Ma’am,” said the cop, “I’m going to strongly recommend that you seek help for your anger issues. This time we’re only going to give you a warning. But if the couple hadn’t been so forgiving, you could be facing serious charges of battery right now.” “Battery!” I said. “Do I look like a batterer?” He was silent. “Can you just tell me. Aside from the broken nose, did they seem happy?” 5.I had always thought of depression as having no shape. When it manifested as a feeling of emptiness, you could inject something into it: a 3 Musketeers, a walk, something to kind of give it a new form. You could penetrate it and give it more of a shape you felt better about. Or at least you could make a shape inside it or around it. But this was something new, like a thicker, gooey sludge. It had its own shape. It could not be contained. It was a terror. Of what I was terrified I couldn’t exactly say, but it was sitting on me. Every other shape was being absorbed into it. I no longer slept. Was this all because of Jamie? How could someone who got on my nerves so much have this much power over me? I asked my doctor for Ambien. The Ambien helped me sleep. But in the mornings the goo was right there, waiting for me. I was already in it. It was becoming more dense. One night I took nine Ambien. I was not trying to kill myself so much as vanish. I just wanted to go to sleep and be transported into the ether, another world. I guess that vanishing would have meant death, so perhaps it was an attempt at suicide? But I felt afraid of death, or at least, afraid of dying. Was there something that wasn’t death but wasn’t here either? I woke up fourteen hours later, ravenous. Doughnuts! I had to have doughnuts. Stoned from the Ambien, I got in my car and the rest was a blur. I must have blacked out. I only remember waking up on the road, parked, wearing my nightie, with doughnuts strewn around the car seats: powdered, cream-filled, a jelly. I didn’t even like jelly. Cars were honking behind me but I couldn’t figure out what to do. So I just stayed parked like that in the middle of the road and went back to sleep on the steering wheel. Then I woke up again. Now a police officer was leaning into my car on the passenger’s side. He asked if I could get out of the car. I climbed out hazily. I remember thinking a dumb joke about cops and doughnuts. Then I realized: it was the same cop who had come to my house about Jamie’s nose. “Hi,” I said. He gave me a Breathalyzer to test my blood alcohol levels. Those were normal. Then he searched the car for drugs but couldn’t find any.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In the bull Exivi de paradiso,123 issued 1813, and famous in the history of the Franciscan order, Clement seemed to take the side of the Spirituals. It forbade the order or any of its members to accept bequests, possess vineyards, sell products from their gardens, build fine churches, or go to law. It permitted only "the use of necessity," usus arctus or pauper, and nothing beyond. The Minorites were to wear no shoes, ride only in cases of necessity, fast from Nov. 1 until Christmas, as well as every Friday, and possess a single mantle with a hood and one without a hood. Clement ordered the new general, Alexander of Alessandra, to turn over to Olivi’s followers the convents of Narbonne, Carcassonne and Béziers, but also ordered the Inquisition to punish the Spirituals who refused submission. In spite of the papal decree, the controversy was still being carried on within the order with great heat, when John XXII. came to the throne. In the decretal Quorumdam exegit, and in the bull Sancta romana et universalis ecclesia, Dec. 30, 1317, John took a positive position against the Spirituals. A few weeks later, he condemned a formal list of their errors and abolished all the convents under Spiritual management. From this time on dates the application of the name Fraticelli124 to the Spirituals. They refused to submit, and took the position that even a pope had no right to modify the Rule of St. Francis. Michael of Cesena, the general of the order, defended them. Sixty-four of their number were summoned to Avignon. Twenty-five refused to yield, and passed into the hands of the Inquisition. Four were burnt as martyrs at Marseilles, May 7, 1318. Others fled to Sicily.125

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Then Stephen hurled the Bible away, and she sank down completely hopeless and beaten, rocking her body backwards and forwards with a kind of abrupt yet methodical rhythm: ‘And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, upon Cain. . . .’ she was rocking now in rhythm to those words, ‘And the Lord set a mark upon Cain—upon Cain—upon Cain. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain. . . .’ That was how Puddle came in and found her, and Puddle said: ‘Where you go, I go, Stephen. All that you’re suffering at this moment I’ve suffered. It was when I was very young like you—but I still remember.’ Stephen looked up with bewildered eyes: ‘Would you go with Cain whom God marked?’ she said slowly, for she had not understood Puddle’s meaning, so she asked her once more: ‘Would you go with Cain?’ Puddle put an arm round Stephen’s bowed shoulders, and she said: ‘You’ve got work to do—come and do it! Why, just because you are what you are, you may actually find that you’ve got an advantage. You may write with a curious double insight—write both men and women from a personal knowledge. Nothing’s completely misplaced or wasted, I’m sure of that—and we’re all part of nature. Some day the world will recognize this, but meanwhile there’s plenty of work that’s waiting. For the sake of all the others who are like you, but less strong and less gifted perhaps, many of them, it’s up to you to have the courage to make good, and I’m here to help you to do it, Stephen.’ BOOK THREECHAPTER 281A pale glint of sunshine devoid of all warmth lay over the wide expanse of the river, touching the funnel of a passing tug that tore at the water like a clumsy harrow; but a field of water is not for the sowing and the river closed back in the wake of the tug, deftly obliterating all traces of its noisy and foolish passing. The trees along the Chelsea Embankment bent and creaked in a sharp March wind. The wind was urging the sap in their branches to flow with a more determined purpose, but the skin of their bodies was blackened and soot clogged so that when touched it left soot on the fingers, and knowing this they were always disheartened and therefore a little slow to respond to the urge of the wind—they were city trees which are always somewhat disheartened. Away to the right against a toneless sky stood the tall factory chimneys beloved of young artists—especially those whose skill is not great, for few can go wrong over factory chimneys—while across the stream Battersea Park still looked misty as though barely convalescent from fog.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  tomb by its excesses and blunders. Royalty and Episcopacy, which struck their roots deep in the past, were restored with the powerful aid of the Presbyterians. And now followed a reaction in favor of political and ecclesiastical despotism, and public and private immorality, which for a time ruined all the good which Puritanism had done. Charles II., who "never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one," broke his solemn pledges and took the lead in intolerance and licentiousness. The Act of Uniformity was re-enacted May 19, 1662, and went into operation on St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1662, made hideous by the St. Bartholomew Massacre, nearly a hundred years before. "And now came in," says Baxter, one of the most moderate as well as most learned and pious of the Nonconformists, "the great inundation of calamities, which in many streams overwhelmed thousands of godly Christians, together with their pastors." All Puritan ministers were expelled from their livings and exposed to starvation, their assemblies forbidden, and absolute obedience to the king and conformity to episcopacy were enforced, even in Scotland. The faithful Presbyterians in that country (the Covenanters) were subjected by the royal dragonnades to all manner of indignities and atrocities. "They were hunted"—says an English historian101 — like criminals over the mountains; their ears were torn from their roots; they were branded with hot irons; their fingers were wrenched asunder by the thumbkins; the bones of their legs were shattered in the boots; women were scourged publicly through the streets; multitudes were transported to the Barbadoes; an infuriated soldiery was let loose upon them, and encouraged to exercise all their ingenuity in torturing them." The period of the Restoration is, perhaps, the most immoral and disgraceful in English history. But it led at last to the final overthrow of the treacherous and semi-popish dynasty of the Stuarts, and inaugurated a new era in the history of religious liberty. Puritanism was not dead, but produced some of its best and most lasting works—Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—in this period of its deepest humiliation and suffering. 8. The act of Toleration under the reign of William and Mary, 1689, made an end to violent persecutions in England. And yet it is far from what we now understand by religious liberty. Toleration is negative, liberty positive; toleration is a favor, liberty a right; toleration may be withdrawn by the power which grants it, liberty is as inalienable as conscience itself; toleration is extended to what cannot be helped and what may be in itself objectionable, liberty is a priceless gift of the Creator. The Toleration of 1689 was an accommodation to a limited number of Dissenters—Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists and Quakers, who were allowed liberty of separate organization and public worship on condition of subscribing thirty-six out of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I had felt, for a long time, that if I started crying I would not stop—that if I finally ripped, there would be nothing to stop my guts from falling out. I was scared of what might come out of me: the things I would see, what others would see. I was scared the feelings would eat me. Feelings were a luxury of the young, or someone much stronger than me—someone more at ease with being human. It was too late for tears. I was to keep going, to move forward on the same track in spite of life’s unsatisfying lifeness. I was not to ask where I was going or if it was where I really wanted to go. I was not to ask if I was actually going anywhere at all. But now, somehow, I was sobbing. And so began the melancholy. The days of crying, without notice, in inopportune situations: at work, at the bank, in the Whole Foods checkout line when I saw his favorite protein powder and my spirit gagged at the loss of him. It was as though the powder were him, or transubstantiated him. So strange to know a person’s favorite protein powder, their favorite flavor (vanilla almond), and then just have them gone. I didn’t call or text. A Pisces and never good at restraint, this time I was dedicated to punitive silence and making him want. He will be back soon, I told myself. He has to be. Four days went by. I heard nothing. I grew enraged. Eight years and this was all? No inquiry into how I was doing? I could have been dead. On the sixth day he called me. He wanted to see how I was holding up. “Not great,” I said. “You?” “Terrible,” he said. “I haven’t been sleeping.” Thank God, I thought. “I know,” I said. “This is so silly. I think we should stop this. Enough is enough.” “I need a little more time,” he said. “Can’t you just come over?” I pleaded. “I don’t think that’s a great idea right now,” he said. “Maybe in a few weeks?” “A few weeks?!” I said. “How much longer is this going to go on for?” “I don’t know,” he said. “I love you.” “Fuck you!” I yelled, and hung up the phone. Then I texted him. i’m sorry i’m just hurt and scared forgive me? i love you too He wrote: let’s just take this time

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Rochelle was clearly a traitor. I felt dissociated from my body, like my head was in a cloud of fog and my limbs were not under my jurisdiction. I started smoking weed around the clock, something I hadn’t done regularly since my early twenties, going to work at the library stoned. I made no progress on my book. I only wanted to lie around and eat sugar and fats: giant chocolaty drinks from Starbucks, bags of Hershey’s minis and gummy candy, tortilla chips with nacho cheese dip. I had always had a small frame and never gained weight easily, except in my hips, which were wide. My choice of clothing made them look deceptively smaller: loose, flowy cotton skirts and dresses, wide linen pants that kept them concealed. The rest of me would be swimming in my clothes, giving me a sort of elfin, pixie look, all thanks to my hips. But now my pants were leaving a tight elastic mark around my waist each time I took them off. I also began engaging in weird crafts. I craved creative expression, an artistic order, but did not have the lucidity of mind for Sappho. I went to the nearby crafts store and bought a hot-glue gun, beads, tools for needlepoint. I began hot-gluing beads onto empty wine bottles, making “vases.” Eventually I stopped going to the library entirely. I told them that I needed a week’s hiatus to work on my book. The other librarians agreed to cover for me. My apartment looked like a frat house mixed with an arts fair. I stayed up all night beading. Then one week turned into two. Finally I dragged my ass back, but I still wasn’t sleeping. I hid in the university bathrooms on the toilet with my eyes closed. And then Jamie did come back, for a night anyway. “I feel ready to meet now,” he said, and so we went to our favorite Mexican spot. After a few margaritas he held my hand under the table and we stared into each other’s eyes. I had not remembered being present for a meal like this, together, both fully engaged, neither of us on our phones, in years. After dinner we made out in his car. He tasted different, like a licorice taste had entered his body in the time we’d been apart. Maybe it was the cilantro. He drove me home and then followed me upstairs. I went to get him a glass of water. When I came into the living room he was sitting on the sofa. “Come here,” he said. I walked toward him and sat on his leg. I held the water up to his lips. He drank, then put it on the table and kissed me. He undressed me, still sitting in his lap. Then he laid me down on the sofa and undressed hastily as I watched him in the dark. We fucked on the sofa, quickly, our mouths on each other’s mouths the whole time.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  So I continued to trudge, not wanting to quit and get a “real” job, not really knowing what I could do anyway. Most of my time in public was spent in the library, amidst the undergrads, and that was where I had heard them use the words butterface and brown bagger . They used these words to describe women of attractive body and unattractive face, and this woman on Abbot Kinney was, in my opinion, definitely one. I moved quickly behind her to observe her further. Her visage, when she turned her head to talk to the man, was hard and pronounced, with a jutting nose and chin, but she had good hair and a hot body to save her. She wore a pair of tiny navy silk shorts from which the very bottom of her ass cheeks protruded ever so slightly. You almost felt compelled to touch them. Everything she said was filtered through her own awareness of how good her ass looked, the words she spoke merely an afterthought compared to the glory at the bottom of those shorts. She was almost like a vehicle for shorts and an ass. She sort of danced a little down the sidewalk and flicked her hair. He was no better. He asked stupid questions—“So how long have you lived here?” and “Do you like it?”—but every question was a chance to put his own hotness into action. Why were they even bothering to speak? Who had time for all of this? Why weren’t they just fucking, right there, out in the open? The entire performance was merely a vessel for something else. It was nothingness. Sure, compared to the greater nothingness—the void, the lack of explicit meaning in life, the fact that none of us knows what is going on here—it was at least something. Their engagement in this dance of elevating a stupid restaurant to high levels of importance, discussing kombucha, making the fleeting matter, the shorts: all of these were a fuck-you to emptiness. Or perhaps these details were symptomatic of their ignorance of nothingness. Was nothingness so imperceptible to them that these things could matter? Could anyone be totally ignorant of the void? Didn’t all of us have an awareness of it, a brush with it—perhaps only once or twice, like at a funeral for someone very close to you, when you walked out of the funeral home and it stopped making sense for just a blip that you existed. Or perhaps a bad mushroom trip where one’s fellow trippers looked like plastic.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  With Garrett and Adam, and even Theo, I’d felt like it was a sign that I was special when they’d wanted to have sex with me. “But love is…” She paused. “Well, love might be something beyond words. It’s funny, in all my years of doing this job, I still don’t really have the words for it.” “Right,” I said. “I think the place for you to start, the question that you might want to ask yourself, isn’t so much what is love,” she said. “But is it really love I’m looking for?” 52. I returned to the rocks. I knew I belonged there. If there was going to be desolation, no number of terrestrial men could fix me. I needed to go to the ocean, the primal tap, where the catalyst of my illness swam freely. If I was going to be alone and full of despair, let me at least be desolate here. Let me go cold turkey in the place I now loved most. Maybe it wouldn’t be so cold turkey after all? Maybe the fumes of memories could bring me down more gently. Only once in that week of waiting by the rocks did someone bother me. A lifeguard drove by in a jeep and asked me if everything was okay. I wanted to say, Well, actually, if you really want to know… but instead I said that I was fine. Then I told him I was a scientist conducting a study of the waves. “You know you’re not supposed to be out here this late at night,” he said. “I know. But it’s for the good of the tides.” “Are you sure you’re okay?” “I’m okay.” Then everything fell silent and he drove away. I took this to mean that I was supposed to be there. I was surely being tested, to see how strong and devoted I was. It was like I was part of some ancient worship ceremony, only instead of leaving candles, food, or wine at the altar, I was leaving myself. And instead of an altar there was the ocean. I would look out into the waves and for a moment I would really believe that I saw him. I had never seen him out in the waves, he never swam close enough to the surface, but now I constantly hallucinated him. Usually he was a bird skimming across the water. Once he was a dolphin. And every time, when what I thought was him would turn out to be only seafoam, or the wind blowing on the water, I wondered how much of everything I had seen or thought I’d seen in my lifetime had been only illusion like that. I wondered if anything was really living or if anything had ever lived. 53.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I was not going to stop hunting for him. I was not even at the place where the addict throws away her drugs only to buy more. I wasn’t throwing anything away. Sappho had never given up on love, even when the longing was a dagger in her heart. When she fucked her lover Phaon, perhaps she thought she wouldn’t get attached. I’ll just fuck this young, hot creature and be done with it, she must have thought. Or maybe she thought she’d fuck him into loving her. But Phaon could not love her back: she was too old, or maybe too needy, and he was newly young and hot, having recently been rubbed with Aphrodite’s magic ointment, which transformed an old man into a sexy boy. It would be difficult for any woman, but there was just no way that Sappho, being Sappho, would be able to play it cool or stay detached. And so she got hooked. I had done all the drugs and now I was at the place where the addict goes to wait for her dealer. Even if she shakes and shakes, she waits. Even if he never returns, she waits. There is nothing else left. So I returned to the rocks every night and sat by the sea with a blanket around me. As the days passed I became less inflamed with pain, and more just empty. I began to feel purified as though I were a gourd and someone had spooned me out. I felt spiritual, almost holy, like I could look down at myself from the sky. There I was, a woman on the rocks by the ocean, wrapped in a blanket, waiting for the return of her lover. Everything I knew about art would say that I was a painting. I was certainly a poem. Sappho was too—her life, perhaps, unknowable, but her feelings were mine. I was mythic. And though I was convinced that I would never see him again, it was too tragic to contemplate. My body cried. But I didn’t let the nothingness eat me whole. Inside me was a small spark of hope that sent me out there every night. I would bring the wagon, just in case he appeared. I wanted to show him I would labor for him. But I also wondered if maybe it was a jinx—that if I brought the wagon he wouldn’t be there, like when you bring an umbrella and it doesn’t rain. Still, the wagon was my totem and I had to bring it. It showed my hope to the gods I didn’t even think I believed in. It was like an empty chalice waiting to be filled.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  I woke up in darkness with my heart racing, and lay still and stupefied until it was time to see Hudson off to school. I would coach myself out of bed, feeling nothing but dread for the day ahead, by telling myself: put one foot down, then the next, then start moving. Looking forward to my first cup of coffee had always been all the motivation I needed to get up, but now the smell of coffee turned my stomach and I thought ruefully of all the mornings Michael and I debated how that day’s brew was as the kids made fun of us for having the same conversation every day. During the day I spent hours talking to friends or sitting alone at home, thinking and crying. I stopped reading the newspapers that piled up in front of my door and tried to keep reading books, my most cherished activity, but I could not track the words across the page, let alone digest their meaning. I found a new therapist, someone my friend Libby connected me to after I started crying in the lobby outside our girls’ ballet class, unable to make small talk anymore. The therapist asked what I was looking for in my sessions with her and I replied unhesitatingly, “Clarity. I am lost at sea right now, and if I don’t find my direction soon I am afraid I will be lost forever.” Gone were the lovingly prepared dinners Michael had praised me for, replaced by piles of tortilla chips with cheese I melted over the top and boxed macaroni and cheese I served to the kids with mumbled apologies. I could not imagine a time this misery would end, but Jessica had shared with me the quote “The only way out is through” and I repeated it to myself dozens of times a day, holding onto it like a lifeline. I was in deep right now, but I had to believe there would someday be an out. By the end of the day, I was emotionally spent, but the kids were in constant need of comforting and counseling so I would go from room to room listening or offering soothing words or accepting misplaced blame that had nowhere else to go until I was finally free to fall exhausted into my own bed. CHAPTER 14Almost ThereThe last winter weeks blurred together as spring break approached. Somehow I had managed to make it through each seemingly endless day, and now I decided to splurge on a room at a ski lodge in Vermont so Hudson could ski while I entertained Georgia at the indoor water park. I bought Daisy a plane ticket for her 18th birthday to visit her friend in California and give her a break from our turmoil.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  In my mind I was just falling, but slowly, drifting through a vast grey space. What do you do when you find out your husband of 22 years, your best friend of 27 years, the father of your children, the man you have made far-off retirement plans with and fantasized about being grandparents with – what do you do when overnight, this man ceases to exist? I texted Jessica, who is an early riser, praying she would be awake. I needed to share this news, to see if I put the words out there if someone might set the record straight and tell me this was impossible and could absolutely not be happening. “Jess, I can’t call you,” I wrote. “But I need you. It’s an emergency. Michael’s been having an affair. I don’t know what to do.” She wrote me back immediately and offered to get in a car and drive upstate, but I didn’t want her to come running to save me, I wanted her to make this nightmare go away. “But I don’t understand. You’ve always said Michael is so in love with me, that he seems to love me more than I do him. How could this be happening? It makes no sense,” I wrote. “I don’t know Laura. I’m so sorry,” she wrote back. “Please make this go away.” “I would do anything to make that happen. I’m sick for you,” she wrote as my panic swelled. In too great a state of disbelief to comprehend the enormity of this news, I could only stare in horror at the phone’s screen, willing Jessica to write back with an explanation that did not – that could not – come. CHAPTER 13The Only Way Out Is ThroughThat austere, dismal February day Michael confirmed his affair passed in a haze as I shuffled between Georgia’s bed, the bathroom, and my own bed. I texted my friend Erika and asked her to call me. She told me later that she had been in the middle of making pancakes with her daughter when she got my text but immediately called her husband Tony to take over, knowing that something was wrong as I was not a friend who normally sent out SOS messages. It still pains me to picture the scene – her sun-drenched suburban kitchen, Tony taking the bowl from her hands so she could tend to me, who would never know that kind of domestic ease with my own husband again. She’d known Michael as long as I had, since she and I had been roommates throughout college; she also knew me better than just about anyone, my other half ever since middle school. She said she was devastated for me, but not totally surprised, that Michael had always been hard to fill up, barely finishing one renovation before looking to move again, or planning the next vacation when we were already on one.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She dragged the coat more closely around her, and stared at the house which was reddening with sunrise. Her heart beat anxiously, fearfully even, as though in some painful anticipation of she knew not what—every window was dark except one or two that were fired by the sunrise. How long she stood there she never knew, it might have been moments, it might have been a lifetime; and then suddenly there was something that moved—the little oak door that led into that garden. It moved cautiously, opening inch by inch, until at last it was standing wide open, and Stephen saw a man and a woman who turned to clasp as though neither of them could endure to be parted from the arms of the other; and as they clung there together and kissed, they swayed unsteadily—drunk with loving. Then, as sometimes happens in moments of great anguish, Stephen could only remember the grotesque. She could only remember a plump-bosomed housemaid in the arms of a coarsely amorous footman, and she laughed and she laughed like a creature demented—laughed and laughed until she must gasp for breath and spit blood from her tongue, which had somehow got bitten in her efforts to stop her hysterical laughing; and some of the blood remained on her chin, jerked there by that agonized laughter. Pale as death, Roger Antrim stared out into the garden, and his tiny moustache looked quite black—like an ink stain smeared above his tremulous mouth by some careless, schoolboy finger. And now Angela’s voice came to Stephen, but faintly. She was saying something—what was she saying? It sounded absurdly as though it were a prayer—‘Christ!’ Then sharply—razor-sharp it sounded as it cut through the air: ‘You, Stephen!’ The laughter died abruptly away, as Stephen turned and walked out of the garden and down the short drive that led to the gates of The Grange, where the motor was waiting. Her face was a mask, quite without expression. She moved stiffly, yet with a curious precision; and she swung up the handle and started the powerful engine without any apparent effort. She drove at great speed but with accurate judgment, for now her mind felt as clear as spring water, and yet there were strange little gaps in her mind—she had not the least idea where she was going. Every road for miles around Upton was familiar, yet she had not the least idea where she was going. Nor did she know how long she drove, nor when she stopped to procure fresh petrol. The sun rose high and hot in the heavens; it beat down on her without warming her coldness, for always she had the sense of a dead thing that lay close against her heart and oppressed it. A corpse—she was carrying a corpse about with her. Was it the corpse of her love for Angela? If so that love was more terrible dead—oh, far more terrible dead than living.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  I frantically entered passwords until an error message popped up saying I had tried too many times and was now locked out. This password was all that was standing between my bewilderment and the clues I needed to make sense of the state of my marriage. Was it portentous or a gift that I was locked out? I could go to sleep right now and in the morning ask Michael about it, or press a little harder about why he was so mad at me if I couldn’t bring myself to confess I had searched his phone. I could stop the ground from opening beneath me by setting the phone down now and calling it a night. I clicked on the OK button to close the app when it unexpectedly opened and I was in. I had been sitting with the phone for two hours. I noted the time, 11:30, and the last text Michael had sent was at 9pm to a female friend, saying he was going to sleep – and here are the words I read as my life as I had known it ceased to exist – he wished it was with her. I felt sheer panic as my finger scrolled back through their conversation. Words leapt off the screen at me in fragments I couldn’t piece together: “I can’t live my life in secret anymore”. “My mother is onto us”. “I stand to lose everything”. “Tell my wife”. “Soulmate”. “Love”. “Divorce”. I knew that once I closed WhatsApp, I would never be able to access it again, but I couldn’t get out fast enough. I felt like I had been sucker-punched. Words in the texts were flying at me and gutting me; like passing a car accident and simultaneously wanting to look and avert one’s eyes, I could not stop the image of those words even after I squeezed my eyes shut. In a stupor, I stumbled breathlessly back into the bedroom I had walked out of with the phone what now felt like a lifetime ago. “Michael,” I said sharply, shaking his shoulder and putting my mouth close to his ear, not wanting to awaken Georgia, sleeping so angelically on my side of the bed, hands folded across her chest. “Wake up.” “What’s wrong?” he asked, his eyes flying open with fear. Shaking, I held his phone aloft. “What?” he asked again. “I know everything,” I said, my hand clutching the phone and waving it in front of him. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “Michael, this would be laughable if it wasn’t so horrific. You always say I’m the best detective. You should have known that eventually I would figure it out.” “Figure what out?” “Your affair. I know it all. I know you’re in love with her and want to leave me. I know, I know,” I said, as my voice began to reach a tone of hysteria.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I thought it was nice that there was a man on Earth who was happy to fuck her—not only to fuck her but to marry her. I wondered if this was where she got her confidence or if it was her confidence that had drawn her husband to her. When Rochelle first introduced me to Jamie, I was barely thirty, and had the luxury of time, a cool air about my future, zero apparent desperation. She probably thought I was normal. Through the years we would meet every six months or so at the same Colombian restaurant and make the same jokes about how her husband and Jamie both snored, the way they both acted like babies when they got a cold. There was an affected comfort in these casual insults, as if to say, I know this man is mine. He isn’t going anywhere. I could take him or leave him. I pretended to her that I didn’t want to marry Jamie, didn’t want to move in together, and had more than enough time with him. I was a woman contented with what she had and did not need more of anyone or anything. But now I became clingy with Rochelle, besieged her with a barrage of compulsive questioning about Jamie’s whereabouts. The questions were coupled with a series of neurotic affirmations on my part that he would be coming back, it was only a matter of when. Simply being around her in those first weeks made me feel connected to Jamie, though she wouldn’t tell me much. She looked at me like I was a woman who had caught a terrible disease that she never thought either of us would catch. She toyed with her dangling beaded earring and said she hadn’t seen him in a while, didn’t want to get in the middle. Then I saw a picture of them on Facebook, sitting next to each other at a birthday party. They each had glasses of wine and little dishes of flan, so fucking civilized. They were clinking glasses. Rochelle was clearly a traitor. I felt dissociated from my body, like my head was in a cloud of fog and my limbs were not under my jurisdiction. I started smoking weed around the clock, something I hadn’t done regularly since my early twenties, going to work at the library stoned. I made no progress on my book. I only wanted to lie around and eat sugar and fats: giant chocolaty drinks from Starbucks, bags of Hershey’s minis and gummy candy, tortilla chips with nacho cheese dip. I had always had a small frame and never gained weight easily, except in my hips, which were wide.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  They reject the story of Israel—indeed the idea that there is a “story” within which Jesus’s words and deeds make sense—and avoid any mention of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. This does not mean, as some have suggested, that they are earlier versions, prereflective first attempts at remembering Jesus. It means that they are later, de-Judaized, dehistoricized distortions, offering salvation not for the world, but from the world. They want nothing to do with Jewish-style creational monotheism, in which the world is God’s good creation, needing to be judged and set right. They want nothing to do with Israel as the people who carry God’s rescuing purposes for the world. They want a dehistoricized world, a de-Judaized world, a “spiritual” world rather than the matter-and- spirit world, the heaven-and-earth world, which Israel’s God has made. They are deconstructing Genesis itself. They have no time for the God of the exodus, the God who sets the slaves free and comes to dwell in their midst. Unless we are constantly aware, in reading the gospels, that they are telling the Jesus story in such a way as to bring out the Israel story, we will never hear their proper harmony. This is the first of the speakers in our sound system that we must turn up to its proper volume. The events of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, to be sure, burst upon an unready first-century Jewish world, as the evangelists make clear on every page. They are the real fulfillment, even though the people weren’t expecting it. All those parables about the returning master or lord come into their own. There wasn’t a smooth “salvation history” in the sense of a steady crescendo, things getting better and better until the moment arrived. Rather, it was the reverse. Israel was in a mess, and God had to do something radically new. But the radically new thing God did was nevertheless the thing he’d always promised, the thing for which they’d always most deeply hoped and prayed. This is the paradox. It runs right through the New Testament, and especially through the gospels. The story reached its goal, but the story itself was looking in the wrong direction. “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” Instead of declaring that they wanted “no king except God,” as their scriptures might have suggested, the chief priests, Israel’s official representatives, declared that they had “no king except Caesar.” But, as John makes clear, Jesus was indeed their true king, and his crucifixion was the full revelation of what that meant. Paradox upon paradox. To this we shall return.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  I explained that I had asked Michael to leave, at least for a week, to give me time to digest this, but that he wouldn’t, that he planned to stay in the family room. Erika agreed that it was only fair to give me space right now. “He refuses,” I said. “He won’t stay with a friend either, he says that’s demoralizing. I was looking up cheap hotel options when you came.” “Laura, stop. You’ve done everything for him for years. He’s a grown man and can find a place to stay on his own. You can’t solve his problems right now,” she told me. “OK, but if I don’t solve this he’ll stay and I can’t tolerate that,” I said. “You’re going to have to take a step back and let him handle this by himself. All you have to do now is take care of yourself and the kids. Stand your ground and focus on what you need to get through a terrible situation he created. You didn’t do this, he did. And he has to clean it up. If you need space, he can at least give you that.” When I arrived home, I was relieved to see my bed empty and Georgia’s door closed; Michael had had the decency to give me privacy for the night. When I awoke in the morning after a fitful sleep, I staggered down the hall to the kitchen to find him typing on his laptop at the table. “Oh, hey,” he said, cheerfully. “So here’s what I’m thinking. I’m writing you a letter. I’m going to write you a letter every day to tell you how I’m feeling so that I can be totally honest with you.” “What? Why? How is that going to help me?” “You said you wanted the truth, so I’m going to give it to you and share my feelings with you on a daily basis.” “No, please don’t,” I cried out. “I don’t want to know what you’re thinking. It’s a moot point now.” “This could be the best thing that’s ever happened to us,” he said with an incessant chipperness. “I see this as an opportunity for us to improve our marriage and reinvent what we once had!” “Wow, Michael. Look at me, I’m a wreck,” I sobbed. “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can’t stop crying. The rug has been pulled out from under me and I’m still falling. I am questioning everything about our lives together since we first met. You’ve always been an optimist but to call this an opportunity? The best thing that could ever happen to us? That’s delusional. You have destroyed me,” I said, and with that, put my head down on the table and convulsed with sobs. When I picked my head up, he looked at me with something between compassion and pity and asked, “What can I do to help you through this?” “You can leave. You can find a place to stay.