Longing

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 Real Sex for Real Women (2008)

  Empty-nest relationshipsWhen children grow up and leave home, one or both parents often imagine that blissful romantic nights will follow. However, many couples find that by the time they have the house to themselves again, they feel they have nothing left in common with each other. Without the children’s lives to discuss, parents may find their only topic of conversation is the weather. The empty-nest syndrome is common and expected—after all, your life is changing for the first time in 18 years. In the wake of this, your relationship will inevitably shift and evolve. You can get it back on track, but you might have to get to know each other again. Think about building up the common ground—shared interests such as travel or golf. Now that children are no longer at the forefront of your minds, you have time to explore other interests, whether they be fitness, cooking, or gardening. While it is important to have separate hobbies to maintain your independence, having a mutual one will help create conversation and give you shared goals. Also have honest conversations about what you want from this next chapter of your life. Take some risks by stating that you would like more intimacy, and attempt to jump-start your sex life. These changes can herald the beginning of a new and beautiful time in your relationship—long weekends away, quiet nights, late mornings and breakfast in bed, and sex all over the house. And this really is a situation that you can create for yourselves, by yourselves. Get the romance backDon’t just long for those heady moments you experienced in the early days of your relationship—make yourselves a promise to reignite that excitement you shared together. Turn off the TV, feed each other strawberries and champagne, make love into the early hours of the morning—and don’t worry if you are late for work. Pursue adventure Your initial feelings of excitement when you first met your lover cannot be duplicated, but they can be imitated. When people engage in adventurous activities such as bungee jumping, riding roller-coasters, skiing, or even watching a scary movie, their brains emit dopamine and adrenaline, which are similar to the chemicals emitted during infatuation. By participating in these types of activities with your partner, you get to spend quality time together and benefit from the surges of excitement and attraction. Stay sexy The way we dress and groom ourselves is a large part of sexual attraction, yet many couples let their appearance fall by the wayside once they become comfortable with each other. Paying attention to your appearance reminds you, and your partner, how sexy you are. Even though you have been together a few years, making as much effort as you did on your first date can lead to similar emotional and sexual rewards.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I said, as we passed a boy in a yellow felt jacket that was bright, in the Brick Lane shadows, as a lantern. ‘I knew a girl once, oh! she would have loved that coat...’It did not take us long, after that, to reach Cable Street. Here we turned left, then right; and at the end of this road I saw the public-house that was, I guessed, our destination: a squat, flat-roofed little building with a gas-jet in a plum-coloured shade above the door, and a garish sign - The Frigate - that reminded me how near our walk had brought us to the Thames.‘It’s this way,’ said Florence self-consciously. She led me past the door and around the building to a smaller, darker entrance at the back. Here a set of rather steep and treacherous-looking steps took us downwards, to what must once have been a cellar; at the bottom there was a door of frosted glass, and behind this was the room - the Boy in the Boat, I remembered to call it - that we had come for.It was not a large room, but it was very shady, and it took me a time to gauge its breadth and height, to see beyond its spots of brightness - its crackling fire, its gas-lamps, the gleam of brass and glass and mirror and pewter at its bar - into the pools of gloom that lay between them. There were, I guessed, about twenty persons in it: they were seated in a row of little stalls, or standing propped against the counter, or gathered in the furthest, brightest corner, about what seemed to be a billiard table. I didn’t like to gaze at them for long, for at our appearance they all, of course, looked up, and I felt strangely shy of them and their opinion.Instead I kept my head down, and followed Florence to the bar. There was a square-chinned woman standing behind it, wiping at a beer-glass with a cloth; when she saw us coming she put both glass and towel down, and smiled.‘Why, Florence! How grand to see you here again! And how bonny you are looking!’ She held out her hand and took Florence’s fingers in her own, and looked her over with pleasure. Then she turned to me.‘This is my friend, Nancy Astley,’ said Flo, rather shyly. ‘This is Mrs Swindles, who keeps bar here.’ Mrs Swindles and I exchanged nods and smiles.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had said that I would see her at the entrance to the public house at six o’clock, and it must, I thought, be past six now ... Even as I thought it, the carriage slowed in the traffic and I saw her standing there, a little way along the street, waiting for me. The brougham crawled still slower; from behind the lace of its windows I could see her perfectly, frowning to her left and right, then bending her head to look at the watch at her bosom, then raising a hand to tuck a curl in place. Her face, I thought, was so very plain and kind. I had a sudden urge to tug at the latch of the door, and race down the street to her side; I could at least, I thought, call to the driver to stop his horse, so that I might shout some apology to her ...But while I sat, anxious and undecided, the traffic grew swift, the carriage gave a jerk, and in a moment Judd Street and plain, kind Florence were far behind me. I could not bear the thought, then, of asking the forbidding Mr Shilling to turn the horse around, for all that I was his mistress for the afternoon. And besides, what would I say to her? I would never, I supposed, be free to meet with her again; and I could hardly expect to have her visit me at Diana’s. She would be surprised, I thought, and cross, when I didn’t turn up: the third woman to be disappointed by me that day. I was sorry, too - but, on reflection, not terribly sorry. Not terribly sorry at all. When I returned to Felicity Place - for that, I saw now, was the name of the square in which my mistress had her home - I was greeted with gifts. I found Diana in the upstairs parlour, bathed and dressed at last, and with her hair in plaits and elaborately pinned. She looked handsome, in a gown of grey and crimson, with her waist very narrow and her back very straight. I recalled those laces and ties I had fumbled over the night before: there was no sign of them now beneath the smooth sheath of her bodice. The thought of that invisible linen and corsetry, which a maid’s steady fingers had fastened and concealed and my own trembling hands, I guessed, would later uncover and undo, was rather thrilling.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Where I was born the trees bear fruit and the ocean hugs the shore, making you believe in things like sea serpents and mermaids and Disneyland. When I was five, California had a smell. Orange trees, their waxen leaves like crowns studded by fruit. Marin County. Stinson beach. Warmth whispered around my skin, I could breath it into me, I was tanned like children get. My hair white against the whole sky. My eyes blue as lapis. In our front yard, orange trees, plum trees, and apple trees. The front of the house keeping its secrets, the hands of a child rubbing bark, or grass, or dirt; child’s games. But the back of the house gave way to ocean and the edge of things - a girl’s thoughts rose and fell as tides, drifted like the smell of orange blossoms through the windows and doors, out, across, beyond vision, beyond daughter. The house is of a man’s hands, and I was not a swimmer yet. Maybe there’s another reason I went to Texas beside escaping to college. Maybe I was looking for something - something of her. Where in that dirt is she from? Is it from a damp place miles down, a place where dead things have composted? The wet at the back of the neck, a woman’s hand wiping sweat away, her eyes closed? Or is she in the heat itself, the dry whisper of wind pushing everything out and away … a woman’s imagination burning a hole in her skull to get out? Did she nearly die waiting? Wanting? Is she in the sound of a southern drawl out the mouth of a woman, its dips and ahs making words go strange, beautiful? My mother was an alcoholic manic depressant borderline suicide case with a limp. All of that. In 2001 my mother went to the doctor because she was having trouble breathing. I was in my ninth month of pregnancy in San Diego. She’d been taking care of my memoryless father for over 15 years by then. I know what kind of toll that caretaking takes. It must have drained every drop of her. My mother didn’t visit doctors much, having spent her childhood years in body casts and hospitals. So there were no chances for early warning. Cancer had already invaded her lungs, her breasts. She called me in San Diego the day before I went into labor to tell me she was dying. Miraculously, Andy answered the phone, and hung up, and lied. He said, “Your mother says she loves you.” He waited for our son to be born. Then he waited a little longer. He told my sister and me in our living room in San Diego a week after Miles was born. The three of us cried in my little seahouse, Miles asleep in my arms.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I didn’t break up with him that night. When we really broke up, well, let’s just say it wasn’t a James Taylor song. And what we made between rage and love and falling asleep - what lived and died between us - haunts me still. That dramatic ending was just the beginning. In the end, I made that boy marry me. The Other Lubbock ONE OF THE RED RAIDER SWIMMER GUYS WAS A DEALER. I don’t think I ever saw Monty not high. His skin looked ashen - even stretched as it was over athlete muscles. His eyes always had rings around them. His face had little holes in it. He did not live in the dorms. He lived with two other non swimmer guys in a house. In his house, there was a basement. The basement door had a marijuana leaf on it with a smiley face in the center. And it was locked. To enter, you needed to know the knock. Two. Three. One. The first time I went down into Monty’s basement I was with Amy. When he opened up, we went in - we were the only women that night. We were fishing for a little danger. Briefly I felt weird. Then weirdly, I didn’t. There were maybe four guys in there besides us. One of those four was also a swimmer. When I looked at him, I couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed, but he smiled and nodded and waved. The room was dark- and not just because the walls were painted black with all kinds of glow in the dark and neon shit all over them. The carpet was dark red shag. One shit brown old sofa, three lava lamps, three posters: Che and Jimi and Malcolm. A fish tank with a bunch of tetras and a giant angel fish glowed blue green in the corner. A small refrigerator, assorted glass bongs, and a big ass coffee table upon which were a variety of items not so good to name. One Love in our ears. Monty came over with pills in his hand and said, “Choose one, and I’ll tell you what it does.” I picked a capsule with a red cap on one side and a yellow cap on the other. Amy passed, shaking her head, saying “ Nuh uh, captain fantastic,” reaching for a bong. Monty looked at me and laughed a classic stoner laugh - huhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhow about you take two?” “What’s it do?” “Don’t you want to know what it is?” “I just want to know what it does,” I said, feigning bad-assery.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  It was cold in the street and I crossed to the lighted blaze of shops in Rue Fuad. In a grocer’s window I saw a small tin of olives with the name Orvieto on it, and overcome by a sudden longing to be on the right side of the Mediterranean, entered the shop: bought it: had it opened there and then: and sitting down at a marble table in that gruesome light I began to eat Italy, its dark scorched flesh, hand-modelled spring soil, dedicated vines. I felt that Melissa would never understand this. I should have to pretend I had lost the money. I did not see at first the great car which she had abandoned in the street with its engine running. She came into the shop with swift and resolute suddenness and said, with the air of authority that Lesbians, or women with money, assume with the obviously indigent: ‘What did you mean by your remark about the antinomian nature of irony?’— or some such sally which I have forgotten. Unable to disentangle myself from Italy I looked up boorishly and saw her leaning down at me from the mirrors on three sides of the room, her dark thrilling face full of a troubled, arrogant reserve. I had of course forgotten what I had said about irony or anything else for that matter, and I told her so with an indifference that was not assumed. She heaved a short sigh, as if of natural relief, and sitting down opposite me lit a French caporal and with short decisive inspirations blew thin streamers of blue smoke up into the harsh light. She looked to me a trifle unbalanced, as she watched me with a candour I found embarrassing — it was as if she were trying to decide to what use I could be put. ‘I liked’ she said ‘the way you quoted his lines about the city. Your Greek is good. Doubtless you are a writer.’ I said: ‘Doubtless.’ Not to be known always wounds. There seemed no point in pursuing all this. I have always hated literary conversation. I offered her an olive which she ate swiftly, spitting the pit into her gloved hand like a cat where she held it absently, saying: ‘I want to take you to Nessim, my husband. Will you come?’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The thought of Kitty weeping brought the tears to my own eyes; and seeing me so affected, she’d give a smile, and a wink, and a stretch, and say in her best swell accent: ‘But those days are all behind me now, don’t you know, and I am on the path to fame and fortune. Since I changed my name and became a masher the whole world loves me; and Tricky Reeves loves me most of all, and pays me like a prince, to prove it!’ And then we would smile together, because we both knew that if she really were a masher Tricky’s wages would barely keep her in champagne; but my smile would be a little troubled for I knew, too, that her contract was due to expire at the end of August, and then she would have to move to another theatre - to Margate, perhaps, she said, or Broadstairs, if they would have her. I couldn’t bear to think what I would do when she was gone. What my family made of my trips backstage, my marvellous new status as Miss Butler’s pal and unofficial dresser, I am not sure. They were, as I have said, impressed; but they were also troubled. It was reassuring for them that it was a real friendship, and not just a schoolgirl mash, that had me travelling so often to the Palace, and spending all my savings on the train fare; and yet, I thought I heard them ask themselves, what manner of friendship could there be between a handsome, clever music-hall artiste, and the girl in the crowd that admired her? When I said that Kitty had no young man (for I had found this out, early on, amongst the pieces of her history) Davy said that I should bring her home, and introduce her to my handsome brother - though he only said it when Rhoda was near, to tease her. When I spoke of brewing her pans of tea and tidying her table, Mother narrowed her eyes: ‘She’s doing all right out of you by the sound of it. It’s a little more help with the tea and the tables we could do with, from you, home here ...’It was true, I suppose, that I rather neglected my duties in the house for the sake of my trips to the Palace. They fell to my sister, though she rarely complained about it. I believe my parents thought her generous, allowing me my freedom at her own expense.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  It was equally characteristic that by the time I reached the little flat and disinterred the grey exercise books in which my notes had been scribbled I thought no longer of destroying them. Indeed I sat there in the lamp-light and added to them while Pombal discoursed on life from the other easy chair. ‘Returning to my room I sit silent, listening to the heavy tone of her scent: a smell perhaps composed of flesh, faeces and herbs, all worked into the dense brocade of her being. This is a peculiar type of love for I do not feel that I possess her — nor indeed would wish to do so. It is as if we joined each other only in self-possession, became partners in a common stage of growth. In fact we outrage love, for we have proved the bonds of friendship stronger. These notes, however they may be read, are intended only as a painstaking affectionate commentary on a world into which I have been born to share my most solitary moments — those of coitus — with Justine. I can get no nearer to the truth. ‘Recently, when it had been difficult to see her for one reason or another, I found myself longing so much for her that I went all the way down to Pietrantoni to try and buy a bottle of her perfume. In vain. The good-tempered girl-assistant dabbed my hands with every mark she had in stock and once or twice I thought that I had discovered it. But no. Something was always missing — I suppose the flesh which the perfume merely costumed. The undertow of the body itself was the missing factor. It was only when in desperation I mentioned Justine’s name that the girl turned immediately to the first perfume we had tried. “Why did you not say so at first?” she asked with an air of professional hurt; everyone, her tone implied, knew the perfume Justine used except myself. It was unrecognizable. Nevertheless I was surprised to discover that jamais de la vie was not among the most expensive or exotic of perfumes.’ (When I took home the little bottle they found in Cohen’s waistcoat-pocket the wraith of Melissa was still there, imprisoned. She could still be detected.) Pombal was reading aloud the long terrible passage from Moeurs which is called ‘The Dummy Speaks’. ‘In all these fortuitous collisions with the male animal I had never known release, no matter what experience I had submitted my body to. I always see in the mirror the image of an ageing fury crying: “j’ai raté mon propre amour — mon amour à mot. Mon amour-propre, mon propre amour. fe l’ai raté. fe n’ai jamais souffert, jamais eu de joie simple et candide”’ He paused only to say: ‘If this is true you are only taking advantage of an illness in loving her,’ and the remark struck me like the edge of an axe wielded by someone of enormous and unconscious strength.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The boxes at the Palace were very close to the stage: all the time she sang, she was less than twenty feet away from me. I could make out all the lovely details of her costume - the watch-chain, looped across the buttons of her waistcoat, the silver links that fastened her cuffs - that I had missed from my old place up in the gallery.I saw her features, too, more clearly. I saw her ears, which were rather small and unpierced. I saw her lips - saw, now, that they were not naturally rosy, but had of course been carmined for the footlights. I saw that her teeth were creamy-white ; and that her eyes were brown as chocolate, like her hair.Because I knew what to expect from her set - and because I spent so much time watching her, rather than listening to her songs - it seemed over in a moment. She was called back, once again, for two encores, and she finished, as before, with the sentimental ballad and the tossing of the rose. This time I saw who caught it: a girl in the third row, a girl in a straw hat with feathers on it, and a dress of yellow satin that was cut at the shoulders and showing her arms. A lovely girl I had never seen before but felt ready at that moment to despise!I looked back to Kitty Butler. She had her topper raised and was making her final, sweeping salute. Notice me, I thought. Notice me! I spelled the words in my head in scarlet letters, as the husband of the mentalist had advised, and sent them burning into her forehead like a brand. Notice me!She turned. Her eyes flicked once my way, as if to note only that the box, empty last night, was occupied now; and then she ducked beneath the dropping crimson of the curtain and was gone.Tricky blew out his candle. ‘Well,’ said Alice a little later, as I stepped into our parlour - our real parlour, not the oyster-house downstairs - ‘and how was Kitty Butler tonight?’‘Just the same as last night, I should think, said Father.‘Not at all,’ I said, pulling off my gloves. ‘She was even better.’‘Even better, my word! If she carries on like that, just think how good she’ll be by Saturday!’Alice gazed at me, her lip twitching. ‘D’you think you can wait till then, Nancy?’ she asked.‘I can,’ I said with a show of carelessness, ‘but I’m not sure that I shall.’ I turned to my mother, who sat sewing by the empty grate. ‘You won’t mind, will you,’ I said lightly, ‘if I go back again tomorrow night?’‘Back again?’ said everyone in amusement.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  With the posting of this letter of acceptance a new period will be initiated, for it marks my separation from the city in which so much has happened to me, so much of momentous importance: so much that has aged me. For a little while, however, life will carry its momentum forward by hours and days. The same streets and squares will burn in my imagination as the Pharos burns in history. Particular rooms in which I have made love, particular café tables where the pressure of fingers upon a wrist held me spellbound, feeling through the hot pavements the rhythms of Alexandria transmitted upwards into bodies which could only interpret them as famished kisses, or endearments uttered in voices hoarse with wonder. To the student of love these separations are a school, bitter yet necessary to one’s growth. They help one to strip oneself mentally of everything save the hunger for more life. Now, too, the actual framework of things is undergoing a subtle transformation, for other partings are also beginning. Nessim is going to Kenya for a holiday. Pombal has achieved crucifixion and a posting to the Chancery in Rome where I have no doubt he will be happier. A series of leisurely farewell parties have begun to serve the purposes of all of us; but they are heavy with the absence of the one person whom nobody ever mentions any more — Justine. It is clear too that a world war is slowly creeping upon us across the couloirs of history — doubling our claims upon each other and upon life. The sweet sickly smell of blood hangs in the darkening air and contributes a sense of excitement, of fondness and frivolity. This note has been absent until now.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I rose, reluctantly, and put on my gloves and my hat, and said that I should go; and then Kitty introduced me - ‘My friend, Miss Astley,’ she called me, which made me feel a little gayer - and Mr Bliss shook my hand.‘Tell your Mother,’ said Kitty as she showed me to the door, ‘that I shall come tomorrow, any time she likes.’‘Come at four,’ I said.‘Four it is, then!’ She briefly took my hand again, and kissed my cheek.Over her shoulder I saw the flashy gentleman fingering his whiskers, but with his eyes turned, politely, away from us. I can hardly say what a curious mix of feelings mine were, the Sunday afternoon when Kitty came to call on us in Whitstable. She was more to me than all the world; that she should be visiting me in my own home, and supping with my family, seemed both a delight too lovely to be borne and a great and dreadful burden. I loved her, and could not but long to have her come; but I loved her, and not a soul must know it - not even she. It would be a torture, I thought, to have to sit beside her at my father’s table with that love within me, mute and restless as a gnawing worm. I would have to smile while Mother asked, Why didn’t Kitty have a beau? and smile again when Davy held Rhoda’s hand, or Tony pinched my sister’s knee beneath the table - when all the while my darling would be at my side, untouchable.Then again, there was the crampedness, and the dinginess - and the unmistakable fishiness - of our home to fret over. Would Kitty think it mean? Would she see the tears in the drugget, the smears on the walls; would she see that the armchairs sagged, that the rugs were faded, that the shawl which Mother had tacked to the mantel, so that it fluttered in the draught from the chimney, was dusty and torn, its fringes unravelling? I had grown up with these things, and for eighteen years had barely noticed them, but I saw them now, for what they really were, as if through her own eyes.I saw my family, too, anew. I saw my father - a gentle man, but prone to dullness. Would Kitty think him dull? And Davy: he could be rather brash; and Rhoda - horrible Rhoda - would certainly be over-pert. What would Kitty make of them? What would she think of Alice - my dearest friend, until a month ago? Would she think her cold, and would her coldness puzzle her?

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Living entirely in the moment, he leaves no traces. He is here when he is here. He is gone when he is gone. Others linger when they are gone, like a bad smell, even when they were never really here in the first place. He is the most present, and as a result, the most emphatically, painfully absent. He recoils from nostalgia, detects sentimentality across a room, and the only hard evidence of our encounters is his relentlessly hard cock. Hardly something a girl can hang on to after the act. He keeps his private life private. I’ve not met his friends and do not know what he does during time not spent with me. He rejects gossip, refuses photographs, and eschews the love note. He is not a romantic, he is a practitioner of the here and now. He acts like a man unafraid of death—or else joyously defiant. I, however, am mortified by my mortality, and so I scribble on and on, searching for evidence, creating evidence, of our affair. He says he doesn’t need devotion. He says he doesn’t even really need to be listened to. If he isn’t heard the first time, he’ll say it again. What he does want, he says, is the adventure, the ride together, the opportunity to enter a time warp with someone. A-Man is a man with many tools. He can hang a mirror with toggle bolts, clean a skylight, grill a rack of lamb, pose naked in the garden like a Rodin sculpture , and fuck my ass. He’s a doer, not a thinker, and he openly admits that he wants a woman to be smarter than he is. I have never before met a guy brave enough to want that. It is the confidence of a man who owns his cock and knows exactly what to do with it and where to put it. Thinkers, in my experience, can’t fuck; they’re too busy with the meaning and the metaphors, too busy avoiding their tool, afraid of entering a hole without a clearly marked exit. He is an underthinker—and overfucker. A-Man leaves the meaning of the metaphors to me. He has given me almost no material gifts. Except one. A twelve-pack stack of yellow legal pads. I am writing on one now. Smart guy. STATISTICS Enough—for now—of my story. What about yours? I am not alone, you know, in my sometimes unlawful obsession. Despite the landmark 2003 Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas that renders all antisodomy laws unconstitutional and unenforceable, the statutes are still on the books in twenty-two states and Puerto Rico (and I suspect that Disneyland has an ordinance somewhere in the fine print). Every state in the Union had an antisodomy law until 1962, when Illinois became the first state to repeal the law.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He pulled a face. ‘Pooh, Nancy, the real thing not good enough for you any more?’Father leaned towards him. ‘Well, we are told it is Kitty Butler,’ he said. ‘If you ask me’ - and here he winked and rubbed his nose - ‘I think there’s a young chap in the orchestra pit what she’s got her eye on ...’‘Ah,’ said Joe, significantly. ‘Let’s hope poor Frederick don’t catch on to it, then ...’At that, everybody looked my way, and I blushed - and so seemed, I suppose, to prove my father’s words. Davy snorted; Mother, who had frowned before, now smiled. I let her - I let them all think just what they liked - and said nothing; and soon, as before, the talk turned to other matters.I could deceive my parents and my brother with my silences; from my sister Alice, however, I could keep nothing.‘Is there a feller you’ve got your eye on, at the Palace?’ she asked me later, when the rest of the house lay hushed and sleeping.‘Of course not,’ I said quietly.‘It’s just Miss Butler, then, that you go to see?’‘Yes.’There was a silence, broken only by the distant rumble of wheels and faint thud of hooves, from the High Street, and the even fainter sucking whoosh of sea against shingle from the bay. We had put out our candle but left the window wide and unshuttered. I saw in the gleam of starlight that Alice’s eyes were open. She was gazing at me with an ambiguous expression that seemed half amusement, half distaste.‘You’re rather keen on her, ain’t you?’ she said then.I looked away, and didn’t answer her at once. When I spoke at last it was not to her at all, but to the darkness.‘When I see her,’ I said, ‘it’s like - I don’t know what it’s like. It’s like I never saw anything at all before. It’s like I am filling up, like a wine-glass when it’s filled with wine. I watch the acts before her and they are like nothing - they’re like dust. Then she walks on the stage and - she is so pretty; and her suit is so nice; and her voice is so sweet ... She makes me want to smile and weep, at once. She makes me sore, here.’ I placed a hand upon my chest, upon the breast-bone. ‘I never saw a girl like her before. I never knew that there were girls like her ...’ My voice became a trembling whisper then, and I found that I could say no more.There was another silence.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  When I was 13 my mother became an award-winning real estate agent. More and more she left the house. More and more alcohol entered. The bathroom closet full of vodka jugs. She cut her hair off in that 1970s real estate agent on the go way. The long trail of her hair sat curled in a box like a cat in her bedroom closet. Sometimes I would sit in the dark of her closet and smell it and cry. Harder “NOW ASK ME FOR WHAT YOU WANT.” Maybe it was because I only saw her three times a year. She lived in New York City, I lived in Eugene, Oregon. Maybe it was her stature - so high up in the academic echelons that it was like being awarded a very important prize to be with her. It could be it was that she liked my brutal and unruly stories. Or that I had no place in her daily life. Maybe it was her scar, her hair, my pathologies. But mostly I think it was what she taught me about pain. When I was 26 a big time academic came to give a talk at the University of Oregon. I’ll tell you right now, I wasn’t prepared for it. I was being all grad student faux smarty butt. I was all Sontag and Benjamin and Deleuze and Foucault. I was talking the talk of Barbara Kruger and Roland Barthes and … who the fuck gives a shit. Point being: I was not prepared to psychosexually regress fast enough and hard enough to make me leave a puddle in my seat. In the auditorium, when she walked out onto the stage, even though I was sitting fairly far from her, I could see that her silver and black hair traveled down the entire length of her back in a braided rope, past her ass. The skin on her face and hands was the color of Albuquerque. When she turned to face our jackastic applause, I saw something. Beginning just underneath the infant thin skin of her left eye was a tiny white gleaming. I had to strain to focus. I had to sit up and lean forward on the edge of my seat. When they dimmed the lights, only a podium lamp illuminated her face from below. I saw then a web of thin white scars that curved around her cheekbone, cupped her jaw, and continued down her neck into the plunge of her shirt.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I listen to Lara and remember the way Hanna used to talk about her mother, defend her, describe how in spite of the fact that she believed her mother was responsible for the break in their family, she loved her and could never fully blame her. When Jed expected Hanna to cut her mother out of their life, she refused. Now Lara expresses the same feelings about her grandmother. Something has changed since her grandmother was our bad wolf. “My grandmother grew up in Russia with eight siblings,” Lara tells me. “She is the youngest and the only one who is educated. She values education and encouraged me to go to graduate school. In fact, she’ll be paying for my doctoral degree,” Lara says and then smiles shyly. “I decided to study psychology. I was just accepted into a PhD program.” Then she starts giggling. “Maybe I want to be you. I mean, as a child, therapy was the only time I didn’t feel alone. I felt that you really wanted to know me.” Lara takes a deep breath. She looks tired and I see how hard she tries to be likable, easygoing, not depressed like her mother. She was always tuned in to others, making sure she was not a burden on them and instead taking care of those around her. “You said you needed my help.” My voice sounds softer than usual as I ask, “Tell me, what brings you here today, Lara?” Lara stares out the window for a long time. “Your old office used to have big windows looking at Grace Church, I remember,” she says, still gazing outside. “There was a coffee place across the street and I used to sit there with my father every week after therapy. He would order fresh mint tea and a croissant, and I would get a baguette and use all the chocolate spreads that were on the table. Every week we would sit there silently, eating and not looking at each other. He never asked me how therapy was. Maybe he was too afraid to know. And I didn’t think about anything else but the sweet spreads that my mother didn’t like me to eat and that made the end of a session less bitter. I never liked separations . “I remember sitting across the street, staring at the entrance of your building, hoping to see you walk out and wave to me. I didn’t want you to meet anyone else after I left. I wanted you just for myself. And I wished that my father would say something, ask me something, it didn’t matter what.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Alice closes her eyes. She speaks without looking at me. “When I met Art he was still married. That’s why. I had just gotten divorced and Art had already left his marriage, but he was not legally divorced. One thing I thought I knew for sure was that I would never, ever be with a married man. It was against everything I believed; it’s wrong, as a principle. So I tried to stay away from him. But it was hard. We worked in the same company and at some point were assigned to work on the same project. We had to speak every day and ended up spending hours on the phone. Our conversations became more and more intimate. Art told me about his separation and how hard it was for him. He had Lili, who was five years old at the time, exactly the age I was when my father left, and he talked about how painful it was for him not to spend nights with her. I told him about my father and how he cheated on us and left for another family. He was the first person I shared all the details with. I even told him about the ceremony my mother conducted.” “The ceremony?” I ask. Alice opens her eyes and looks at me. “Right, I forgot that I didn’t tell you about it. It’s a weird story. I was in first grade, and my father had already left but they were not yet divorced. One Sunday evening, my mother drove me to his office. I had been there many times before with my dad, but that evening was different. She opened the door with a key that she still had from when they were together. His office looked exactly the way I remembered it. My father is an accountant, and his office was on the second floor of a brownstone in town, about an hour from where we lived.” Alice closes her eyes again as she continues talking.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  And I want to kiss him but I know it’s not a good idea; after all, we are not in his office anymore, and we make believe that he is my car-service driver. “He drops me off a few blocks from my building, and when I say good night my heart breaks a little. I really don’t want to go upstairs, back into the highway of my life. Josh knows exactly how I feel, and without me needing to say anything, he tells me, ‘Don’t forget how much I love you. I’ll see you on Wednesday. It’s very soon; it’s sooner than you think.’ “I make a face and he knows that I think Wednesday is years from now and that I will have so many feelings and thoughts that he won’t be a part of until Wednesday, and he says, ‘I’m on our app. I’m here, even if I’m not physically with you.’” She puts on her sunglasses. “This is usually when I stop feeling anything and leave the car.” I see that she becomes disconnected in order to leave him, and that she does it again right before my eyes as she tells me about it. I lose her to a long silence before she leaves. Many of my patients come to see me because of my professional writing and teaching on the subject of sexuality. I see men and women who feel destroyed by a partner’s affair, others who had or are having affairs, and those who are lovers of married people. Their stories are different and their motivations are diverse, but all these people reveal themselves to be tortured as they struggle with their own secrets or with the secrets of the people in their lives. While I am aware of the transactional aspect of every relationship, I also believe in love. I believe in the power of attachment between two people, in loyalty as one of the basic foundations of trust, and I consider destructive and creative forces to be part of every relationship. We love and at times we also hate the people we love; we trust them but are also afraid of the injuries and hurt they might cause us. One of the goals associated with growth is the ability to integrate positive and negative feelings: to hate lovingly, to love while recognizing moments of disappointment and anger. The more we can know and own our destructive urges, the more able we become to love fully.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  Is it their fault? God’s fault? Some sixth sense they lack or a cosmic code they have yet to crack? I think part of the issue is the wording we use. Voice and hearing imply our physical sense of hearing. But God very rarely speaks in audible form. He did that a few times in the Bible, and it scared the crud out of people. I’m not suggesting we need different words. I don’t think there are any. Hearing is as close as we can come to capturing what happens. And it is the term the Bible uses repeatedly. Rather than changing the word, we need to expand it. Hearing God doesn’t happen with our ears, but with our hearts. His voice doesn’t vibrate in our eardrums; it resonates in our spirits. It doesn’t come as a hurricane, but as a gentle breeze. It’s easy to miss. It’s easy to ignore (at least for a while). But it’s life-giving when we hear it. Like any relationship, your interactions with God will be personal and unique, and will grow and develop at their own pace. I can’t teach you techniques that will suddenly make God’s voice easy to hear. Instead, I just want to share a few things that have helped me. Learn from them if they’re helpful, but don’t follow them like a rule book. Rather, come to God with the most precious gift you have to offer, and the only one He wants: yourself. Ground your prayer in God’s promise: “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13). Meditate on what Jesus said in John 10:27, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.” We’re humans. We don’t always get spiritual things right. God doesn’t expect us to. He is patient, kind, and loving. He meets us where we are.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  I felt its quick little claws on my finger, while my parents were praying. I did not recognize my mother when she came to visit once, and I cried for Margaret, my big-nosed Nanny. Sent to my Grandmother's in North Holland, I remember gulping my oatmeal so I could see the blue fish painted on the bottom of the bowl ... and holding onto my Grandfather's sandy thumb as we walked along the deep grey sea. But I did live with my parents, in Utrecht, Deventer and Amsterdam. I thought all new clothes smelled like the Salvation Army. Mama made a rag-doll for me out of a pink dress I had outgrown, but by then I was too old to play with dolls. . For God's sake, I was sent to an Art School in Korea so I could "learn the language and culture of the homeland" I lived in a dorm with ondol heating under the orange vinyl floor I was eleven. I did not see my mother for three years, and when she came, they wouldn't let me go to meet her at Kimpo Airport. I got boils. I still have scars. I came to live on their little farm in Friesland but I was fifteen and it was not my home. I didn't peel tulip bulbs like the other daughters. I biked an hour to the city and drew portraits of people on the sidewalk. They paid me guilders. I wrote letters to far-away friends, and left for America when I was eighteen. Now I wish they would send me that doll, but they sent me a Delft blue porcelain vase, which arrived shattered like my childhood, so I threw it away, along with my parents and their God. Humans Are Free Beingsby Frances L. Frances L. grew up in the Children of God, a neo-Christian cult. She escaped as a teenager and speaks strongly here about adjustment and identity issues for children leaving cults. She wrote this after several years out of the cult, as she was starting college. Since then, Frances has successfully obtained a graduate professional degree. The other day somebody told me, "Nobody owes it to you to understand you." In that light, having been born and raised in a cult, I am hesitant to write about what it feels like to live in the outside world. Yet I would not be writing this if I did not expect somebody to understand. If people outside cults expect a person who grew up in a cult to adjust, then it would be helpful if they would try to understand the difficulties and dilemmas. When I ran away from the cult, it was not like one fine day I was sitting there and it dawned on me that because I'd decided the cult was wrong I could get up and walk out. Leaving the cult was the biggest, most fearsome thing I could ever have dreamed of doing.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  ‘With her going the city took on an unnerving strangeness for him’ writes Arnauti. ‘Wherever his memory of her turned a familiar corner she recreated herself swiftly, vividly, and superimposed those haunted eyes and hands on the streets and squares. Old conversations leaped up and hit him among the polished table-tops of cafés where once they had sat, gazing like drunkards into each other’s eyes. Sometimes she appeared walking a few paces ahead of him in the dark street. She would stop to adjust the strap of a sandal and he would overtake her with beating heart — only to find it was someone else. Particular doors seemed just about to admit her. He would sit and watch them doggedly. At other times he was suddenly seized by the irresistible conviction that she was about to arrive on a particular train, and he hurried to the station and breasted the crowd of passengers like a man fording a river. Or he might sit in the stuffy waiting-room of the airport after midnight watching the departures and arrivals, in case she were coming back to surprise him. In this way she controlled his imagination and taught him how feeble reason was; and he carried the consciousness of her going heavily about with him — like a dead baby from which one could not bring oneself to part.’ The night after Justine went away there was a freak thunderstorm of tremendous intensity. I had been wandering about in the rain for hours, a prey not only to feelings which I could not control but also to remorse for what I imagined Nessim must be feeling. Frankly, I hardly dared to go back to the empty flat, lest I should be tempted along the path Pursewarden had already taken so easily, with so little premeditation. Passing Rue Fuad for the seventh time, coatless and hatless in that blinding downpour, I happened to catch sight of the light in Clea’s high window and on an impulse rang the bell. The front door opened with a whine and I stepped into the silence of the building from the dark street with its booming of rain in gutters and the splash of overflowing manholes. She opened the door to me and at a glance took in my condition. I was made to enter, peel off my sodden clothes and put on the blue dressing-gown. The little electric fire was a blessing, and Clea set about making me hot coffee.