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 The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And Concha answered: ‘I also see nothing; it is better to suppose that there is nothing to see. They are wealthy and the big one is very careless—she trusts me completely and I do my utmost. She is so taken up with the amighita that I really believe I could easily rob her! Quien sabe? They are certainly queer those two—however, I am blind, it is better so; and in any case they are only the English!’ But Pedro was very sorely afflicted, for Pedro had fallen in love with Mary, and now he must stay at home in the garden when she and Stephen rode up to the mountains. Now they wished to be all alone it seemed, and what food they took would be stuffed into a pocket. It was spring and Pedro was deeply enamoured, so that he sighed as he tended the roses, sighed and stubbed the hard earth with his toes, and made insolent faces at the good-tempered Ramon, and killed flies with a kind of grim desperation, and sang songs of longing under his breath: ‘A-a-a-y! Thou art to me as the mountain. Would I could melt thy virginal snows. . . .’ ‘Would I could kick thy behind!’ grinned Ramon. One evening Mary asked Pedro to sing, speaking to him in her halting Spanish. So Pedro went off and got his guitar; but when he must stand there and sing before Mary he could only stammer a childish old song having in it nothing of passion and longing: ‘I was born on a reef that is washed by the sea; It is a part of Spain that is called Teneriffe. I was born on a reef. . . .’ sang the unhappy Pedro. Stephen felt sorry for the lanky boy with the lovesick eyes, and so to console him she offered him money, ten pesetas—for she knew that these people set much store by money. But Pedro seemed to have grown very tall as he gently but firmly refused consolation. Then he suddenly burst into tears and fled, leaving his little guitar behind him. 3The days were too short, as were now the nights—those spring nights of soft heat and incredible moonlight. And because they both felt that something was passing, they would turn their minds to thoughts of the future. The future was drawing very near to the present; in less than three weeks they must start for Paris. Mary would suddenly cling to Stephen: ‘Say that you’ll never leave me, belovèd!’ ‘How could I leave you and go on living?’ Thus their talk of the future would often drift into talk of love, that is always timeless. On their lips, as in their hearts, would be words such as countless other lovers had spoken, for love is the sweetest monotony that was ever conceived of by the Creator. ‘Promise you’ll never stop loving me, Stephen.’ ‘Never. You know that I couldn’t Mary.’

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  He did not see his page again before they reached the town of Tsuyama in the Province of Mimasaka, and there he caught but a bare glimpse of him. That was his last chance, for soon the Lord arrived safely in the Province of Yezumo. There Guzayemon became a labourer to gain his food, for he had spent all his money during the long journey from Yedo to Yezumo. In the following year the Lord again set out for Yedo, to pay his court to the Shyôgun in April. Guzayemon followed in his train a second time; but he only beheld the page thrice during the whole journey: once in the ferry at Kuwana, the second time on the Steep hill of Shihomizaki, and the last time in the grove of Suzuga, quite close to Yedo. Then the Lord remained for a whole year at Yedo. Guzayemon went every day to the palace in the hope of seeing his love. With the life that he was leading, all his refinement and distinguished appearance had gone from him. He was haggard and miserable. No one could have discerned in him a fallen samurai, whose beauty had once been famous. His health was also affected. Next year he again followed the Lord from Yedo to his Province. He looked like a beggar, so greatly had he suffered. His clothes had more than one hole in them, and his sleeves were torn. But he kept his two swords, which are the soul of a samurai. In the outskirts of a town called Kanaya he saw the page's litter. And Shyume saw Guzayemon from his litter, and understood that Guzayemon loved him. He was deeply touched by such an attachment, and wished to speak to him. So he descended from his litter, while the train Stopped for a short time on Mount Sayono Nakayama, and Stood waiting for Guzayemon to approach. But Guzayemon was too far off to come near him, and they saw each other no more on that occasion. Guzayemon did not indeed behold him again during the whole of that journey, though he did not cease to think of him. His feet were worn and bleeding from his long walking; he had no more money, and ended by becoming a beggar by the roadside. But he clung desperately to his miserable life. He protected his body from rain, snow and wind with a thin reed hat and a garment of woven grass. He shivered when it blew cold. During the day he Stayed in a vile thatched hut in a field, and at evening, when Shyume returned home to his master's palace, stood near the palace door and consoled himself by watching the dear lad from a distance.

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  Love is very deep, Their reflection is very deep. I had to wet my sleeves To gather them, And I want to go on Wetting, wetting, wetting my sleeves. 84. First Snow. This first snow Is very white Like first love. My maid asks from the doorstep: 'Where shall I throw The tea-leaves?' 85. Bed. Under the unnecessarily large Mosquito curtain My little heart Is fiercer than a nightlight. 86. Then. The flowers come to blossom, then We look at the flowers, then They wither, then

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Sappho’s gaps are not intentional negative space, and I do not propose we read them as such. The words are gone and they are never coming back, I typed. We can try to fill the gaps with biographical knowledge, but this will not replicate the music. Guessing at gaps cannot simulate music. Nor can the silence of the gaps simulate the missing music either. But the silence comes closer. Had Claire somehow helped me find a new direction, a new legitimacy to my thesis? At least I was admitting that my own idea had been bullshit—that you couldn’t read something as intentional if it had never been intentional, even through a perverted academic lens. Yet one crux of my thesis remained: there should be no attempt made to fill in the gaps with biography or bullshit narrative. So what to do with them then—the discomfort of not knowing? How to savor what was there without guessing at what wasn’t? I was drunk but the question seemed good. The writing seemed good. Around midnight, somehow, I found myself back out again on the rocks. It was chilly and I didn’t bring a sweater. I looked around, and then, feeling embarrassed, I stopped. It was obvious Theo wasn’t there, but I kept imagining that he was—or that he was deeper in the waves, farther out, watching me looking for him, laughing. I pretended to myself that I had come out to the rocks simply because I had wanted to be near the ocean. But I was disappointed. I turned to go home. “Lucy,” said a voice. It was Theo. Had he been hiding behind a rock? This kid was confusing. When I felt him watching me from far away, maybe was he watching me from much closer? He sort of bobbed a few feet away. “You’re back,” I said cheerfully, but casual. I did not ask where he had been. “I’m back,” he said. “How have the dates been treating you?” “Disgusting,” I said. “Ah, too bad.” “Each its own little death.” “Funny,” he said. “You’re like a little death.” “What?” I asked. “You are. You’re…gloomy yet charming. I like it.” “Well, no one has said that before.” “You’re gently death-ish. You know about death, you’re aware of it, and most people aren’t anymore. But you’re not a killer. You’re a soft darkness.” A soft darkness. “Yeah, I’m aware of death,” I said. I was thinking about the doughnut incident. “In high school I wore black lipstick and black nail polish.” “That’s not what I mean,” he said. “It’s not manufactured. You have it in you.” “What about you? What’s your story?” I asked. “Oh God, I hate my story,” said Theo. “I bet you have a great story.” “What do you want to know, exactly?” he asked. He was treading water a little faster now. I caught a glint of his wet suit under the waves. “Where do you live?” I asked. “Around here,” he said.

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

  The reasonableness of Christianity, and its agreement with all the true and the beautiful in the Greek philosophy and poesy. All who had lived rationally before Christ were really, though unconsciously, already Christians. Thus all that is Christian is rational, and all that is truly rational is Christian. Yet, on the other hand, of course, Christianity is supra-rational (not irrational). 7. The adaptation of Christianity to the deepest needs of human nature, which it alone can meet. Here belongs Tertullian’s appeal to the "testimonia animae naturaliter Christianae;" his profound thought, that the human soul is, in its inmost essence and instinct, predestined for Christianity, and can find rest and peace in that alone. "The soul," says he, "though confined in the prison of the body, though perverted by bad training, though weakened by lusts and passions, though given to the service of false gods, still no sooner awakes from its intoxication and its dreams, and recovers its health, than it calls upon God by the one name due to him: ’Great God! good God!’—and then looks, not to the capitol, but to heaven; for it knows the abode of the living God, from whom it proceeds."116 This deep longing of the human soul for the living God in Christ, Augustin, in whom Tertullian’s spirit returned purified and enriched, afterwards expressed in the grand sentence: "Thou, O God, hast made us for thee, and our heart is restless, till it rests in thee."117

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But, in the texts that first-century Jews read, prayed, sang, and pondered, there were various visions of how God’s “theocracy,” his worldwide kingdom, would come into reality and (not least) what it might look like when it did. Some people, it seems, really did want a “theocracy” not too far removed from what we see in some parts of the world today. Simeon ben Kosiba (a.k.a. bar-Kochba), the great would-be messiah of the 130s AD, seems to have tried to establish that kind of divine rule. Others were not so sure. But because the Jews believed that (as we find in books such as Daniel and Jeremiah) God’s will for his people in exile was that they live wisely within the pagan world where they found themselves, and because they believed that God was ultimately sovereign (in ways that are normally invisible) over those nations, they were able to develop a theological account of the comings and goings of pagan nations and their rulers as well as a subversive literature and lifestyle designed to critique the pagan rulers, to encourage the faithful, and to warn of God’s ultimate judgment. (That literature included what may be called “apocalyptic,” coded and symbolic writing about the powers of the world and the powers of God, intending to “reveal” or “unveil” the hidden divine truth behind the outward realities of power and empire.) But within Israel itself there were problems too. The corrupt pseudoaristocracy of the high-priestly family, the fake monarchs of the Hasmonean and then Herodian families, and different movements of reform and revolution and various stages in between—none of this offered a real sense of completion, of God’s best will for the world coming into view at last. That sense of incompleteness, of an unfinished story, was not simply a matter of texts. It was a matter of a whole society struggling to see its way forward, clinging to the institutions of Temple and Torah and the festivals that embraced both, hoping that somehow the sovereign creator God would take his power and reign in the way he had always promised. Hoping, in fact, for a new exodus. So, to sum up this very long but necessary introduction. Judaism always assumed that the creator God wanted the world to be ordered and ruled by his image-bearing humans. The world, heaven and earth, was created as God’s temple, and his image-bearers were the key elements in that temple. But the world was out of joint through the failure of humans in general and Israel in particular, so God the creator would have to act in judgment and justice to hold them to account. And the sign of that coming judgment was that at the heart of the world God had placed his covenant people, gathered around the Temple, which was the microcosm of creation, to celebrate his true order and to pray for it to come on earth as in heaven.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  The vet hadn’t exactly said it would all be fine, but she didn’t seem particularly concerned either. I felt strangely jealous that Annika would come home to see the dog. After my mother died, I longed for my sister to take some time off from college to be with me. I verbalized this one time, a few days after the funeral, that maybe she might delay her return to school. She was sitting on my bed behind me, playing with my hair, which was something my mother used to do every night before I went to sleep. It was very quiet; the only sound I could hear was the gentle brush of her fingers against my scalp. “Please stay with me,” I said. “I need you.” But she told me she had exams, and while she wanted to stay with me, she had to go back or she wouldn’t complete the semester. I felt totally rejected, but I did not judge her. I looked up to her, and my world had already been so destroyed by the death of my mother that I couldn’t afford to be angry with her. But it hurt, nonetheless. So instead I judged myself. I made myself wrong for needing someone, for revealing that need. I needed more than the universe could give me. Clearly my feelings were too big for the universe to hold, too disgusting. I would not put them out there like that again. I didn’t even want to have to feel them myself. Well, now I was feeling again and I did not want Annika coming home. If she returned there was no way I could just wander out to the ocean alone at night. I guess I could still go to the rocks and not tell her where I was going—I could lie and say I was going across town or to a café to see some acoustic guitar bullshit. But if she saw me out the window, what would I say I was doing? She would start asking questions. Also, I had a new fantasy. I wanted to ask Theo if he would maybe come with me to the house and stay for a night. I didn’t know how I would get him there. Certainly he couldn’t drag himself across the beach. I doubted he would want me to carry him. But maybe I could get one of those little sand-wagon things, or a bicycle with a wagon on the back. I had already planned this visit, fully, in my head. I wanted to have sex with him on a bed. I didn’t even care if he slept over or not. I just wanted a place to be with him where we could relax that wasn’t freezing and where we weren’t looking around for people to catch us. The way I felt when we kissed or when he went down on me—I wanted to create that feeling and live in that for as long as I could.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  “You can’t tell anyone you’re going,” he said, pulling away from me. “They will think you’re crazy and lock you up.” “I know. I won’t tell them anything,” I said. “Good,” he said. “In the meantime, how about you come stay at the house with me for a little while? As I’m preparing. The dog is asleep. I’ve been making him sleep every day now just in case you were here so I could bring you home with me.” “No,” he said. “I’m finished with the land.” “Oh,” I said. “This is as far as I can go. I hope you understand why.” I didn’t want to understand, but I did. He had sacrificed for me. The thought of him dragging himself back across the beach that night, the danger he put himself in, was scary. Now he wanted me to sacrifice for him. But hadn’t I done that? What had this whole week been? “I’ll meet you here each night until Thursday,” he said. “And you can tell me whether you are still coming.” He looked different to me now, more bloated in the face and jaded. His eyes looked darker. I didn’t know how I felt about the fact that he needed me as much as I needed him. It scared me to be needed. “I’m coming,” I said. “Good.” We brought our faces together and kissed gently on the mouth. He put one of his hands at the base of my neck, under my chin, and tightened it—not enough to cut off my air supply, but just so I could feel him pressing a bit into my larynx. My throat felt full of pleasure and emotion. I opened my mouth wider on his and made an “ohhh” sound. We kissed wetly. “I wish we could live the rest of our lives on these rocks,” I said. “Why isn’t it possible to just live at the edge of both, the ocean and the land?” Of course I knew why. The edge was an uncomfortable and dangerous place for both of us. The rocks were nowhere to live. I had wanted him to come to my world for that same reason. “One day these rocks won’t be here,” he said. “The ocean will waste them away.” “Then we could find new rocks,” I said. “Eventually you have to choose,” he said. “That’s how the story has always been and that’s the way it will be forever.” “But why?” I asked. “Well,” he said, thinking, “I guess because the choice is always there.” 54.When I got back to the house, Dominic didn’t bark. This was odd, because he always smelled Theo on me. I went into the pantry to check on him. He was lying there on his side, perfectly still. “Dominic,” I said. “Domi.”

• From How God Became King (2012)

  (Note the irony: Babylon, “Babel,” is the place of human pride and idolatry in contrast to which God called Abraham in the first place.) The whole of what we call the Second Temple period, roughly 538 BC onward, is characterized by this sense of divine absence; God is gone, and he hasn’t come back. That is the problem faced by the prophet Malachi; the priests are bored and slack in their liturgical duties because, though they’ve rebuilt the Temple, there’s no sense of YHWH having returned, as Ezekiel had said he would. Ah, says Malachi, but the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his Temple—“but who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears” (3:1–2)? Are you ready, in other words, for another moment like that in 1 Kings 8 when Solomon dedicated the Temple and the glory of YHWH filled the house, or that moment in Isaiah 6 when the prophet saw YHWH high and lifted up, filling the Temple with his train and the house with smoke? Here, then, is the great biblical theme that enables us to understand what the gospels are saying about God—not just any “god,” but Israel’s God, the covenant God, the creator. That YHWH will come back was the underlying theological narrative of a great deal of Second Temple literature, giving direction not only to thinkers and writers but to activists and would-be leaders, as we see in the great Temple-cleansing and Temple-rebuilding projects of the Maccabees, of Herod, of the final ill-fated would-be messiah Simon bar-Kochba. That he had not yet done so was the constant ache, the nagging sorrow both for the pious, praying the Psalms and waiting patiently, and for the pragmatists, knowing that until he came back Israel would not be free of foreign domination. The book of Exodus ends with the divine presence coming at last to dwell in the newly built tabernacle. The Hebrew scriptures as a whole end with the hope that the larger-scale story that mirrors that early, prototypical narrative will have a similar ending. The problem is that nobody knows when or how this will happen. The story the gospels are telling, once we turn down the overly loud volume of the second speaker, which has simply been shouting, “He’s divine! He’s divine!” is the story of how YHWH came back to his people at last . Looking for the Right Thing At this point we have to be careful and once more get some critical distance from the main streams of our own recent traditions. It all depends on looking for the right thing . It has been popular for well over a hundred years to see the explicitly high Christology of John as contrasted with the implicitly low Christology of the synoptics. According to this view, John thinks Jesus is divine, but Matthew, Mark, and Luke basically don’t.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I can’t say that I was enjoying it, exactly, or even relaxing, but I felt that I was absorbing the stupidity and slowness of the niceness. Like I was siphoning off its worst qualities. Actually, it did feel good. I just wanted to drool and be dumb. Two glasses of wine later and I was almost there. I ordered another one. Then I got nervous. What was I doing? I should be home actually working on my book. Where was my life going? I couldn’t think about it. I ate some olives and stared down the sun. I was wearing the same black dress that I had worn with Adam. I had liked it so much when I got it, but now that it was no longer new it didn’t feel good enough. Now that I had owned it for more than a minute it had gotten some of me on it. My mouth tasted acidic. I felt rumpled, like I was wearing dirty laundry. I kind of forgot that Garrett was coming until he tapped me on the shoulder. He was undeniably gorgeous in real life: six feet tall with a close-cut beard that looked like an evil shadow. Under the beard you could still see the outline of his jaw, which was strong and handsome. His jaw was in attendance. Also, he had the hair—the Tinder hair I called it, because a lot of the boys on there had that same look. It was like a not-so-secret code amongst the young and hip, this haircut where the sides were shaved all butch but the top was long, in what resembled a pompadour. His shirt was gingham and he smelled like the woods. He ordered a whiskey and ginger ale and asked what I wanted. I was afraid that if I drank any more I would fall off my chair, so I told him that I had just met a friend for cocktails prior and was okay for right now. Instead I ordered a sparkling water and avocado toast. Garrett told me that he would be flying to New York the following day to teach classes in design at different universities. I kept staring at his jawline. I had forgotten they made them like that. He was boring, never asking me about myself, but I was so engaged by his jaw that it made what he said more interesting. It was his jaw that was speaking, not his mouth. The jaw also made me a little sad. It made me forget he had a girlfriend and then remember again. Like, in spite of his boringness, I kind of wanted the jaw to be mine. He did a good job not talking about the girlfriend. It would be easy for someone else to forget he had one.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Nobody broke up with anyone unless they had someone else locked down. Even Jamie, who—when we were together—seemingly only wanted to be free, had not initiated the breakup. In fact, that had been my fatal error: breaking up with him before I had anyone to trapeze onto. Of course, all of that had led me here, to Venice and Theo, so perhaps it hadn’t been such an error. “Well, we’ll just have to see what happens when you’re back in Phoenix,” she said knowingly. “ If I come back,” I said. “Really? You might stay there?” she asked. She sounded impressed. “I don’t know, maybe. I just love being so free right now, not beholden to anyone or anything,” I said, lying completely. I was only trying to fool her, as I hadn’t really planned out the idea of staying. The truth was, I couldn’t fully admit to myself that I wanted to stay. To do this would mean putting an end to the peach pit, blasting it to smithereens. And though it was parked in the far corner of my mind, I needed it. I didn’t actively acknowledge that I needed it—this escape or safety valve—but on a primal level I knew. Perhaps this was what living in the moment was about: an active state of denial about the future. I also felt that somehow Theo just “knew” that not only would my sister be returning soon but that I would be leaving. Maybe this was what past men had assumed of me? That I simply knew everything was temporary between us. I felt as though it would be evident to anyone, even Theo, that Venice was not my natural habitat. As beachy as I looked in my long white dresses, which I wore solely now—never black anymore—there was something about me that didn’t belong. I was like a cactus, a storer of water, and not a creature who naturally immersed in the water. I didn’t take things lightly. I hoarded. And our differences were evident each morning when his tail would begin to go dry and crack, and we would rush him back to the ocean. I couldn’t hoard him. He did not ask to hoard me. And so I assumed that he never asked if my sister would be returning, or when I planned to leave, because on some level he already knew. But he didn’t know. And sometimes when we were fucking, despite the relegation of the peach pit to a far corner of my mind, I would begin to cry. There would be the eternality and then a sudden break in the eternality that brought tears. Before the doughnuts, I didn’t even know I wanted to die. Now, I attributed my crying to joy. I hadn’t known that I’d wanted joy either. I had not ever known that I could have it.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Jude. “Lucy,” she said, blowing the dust off a book called Low Self-Esteem and Addiction: The Siamese Twins . “It’s good to see you back. I’m sorry you are suffering.” “Thanks,” I said, wiping my nose. She offered me a tissue. “Can I ask you a question?” I said. “Sure.” “When you said that you were content without anyone—that a person could be content without anyone—did you mean it?” “Oh, Lucy,” she said. “Because I just feel like that’s a lie. I think everyone is looking for someone. And I think that if they aren’t, they’re just pretending.” “That isn’t necessarily true,” she said. “Me, I’m just happy to be alive. Do you really want to know what I think? Well, let me tell you something that you don’t know about me. I’m a breast cancer survivor.” “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s okay,” she said. “I had stage-three breast cancer when I was only forty-nine. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it. In fact, I didn’t think I would. But after a number of very grueling years of chemo and radiation, as well as a double mastectomy, I was declared cancer-free. And I’m still in remission.” “That’s great.” “It is,” she said. “But after the cancer, going through that horrible experience, I took a good look at my life. I thought about what I wanted the next years of my life to look like, however many I had left. And one thing I realized was that I no longer wanted to be with my husband. It was a very hard thing to come to terms with. I have no children. My family lives on the East Coast. He was my family and had seen me through the whole ordeal. He still loved me very much. But I was no longer in love with him. And I realized then that I would rather be by myself, even if it meant never finding anyone again, even with my body looking the way it did postsurgery, than spend the rest of my life with someone I didn’t love.” “How did you know you weren’t in love with him anymore?” I asked. “I just knew,” she said. “Over time I realized.” “I get so confused,” I said. “There were moments when I felt like I was no longer in love with Jamie at all. But after we broke up I wanted him back more than anything. So maybe it was the lust that had faded.” “Lust is lust,” she said. “Any woman can have sex. It’s not hard to find a man to sleep with you.” This was true. I’d never thought of it like that before.

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

  He has recently passed away after a long illness, and I think it might be cathartic for her to talk about him in his younger and healthier years. “I lived in a decrepit walk-up on St. Mark’s Place and one day I bumped into this guy who had just spilled groceries all over the hallway. He had brought them for a friend but it was pouring out and the bag had gotten wet and ripped and his friend wasn’t home, but he couldn’t just leave the food in the hallway, so he gave it to me. We started talking and he invited me to a party that was being thrown by his friend, an artist named Stephen who lived uptown with his girlfriend. I went and there was this interesting group of artists and writers who threw parties all the time. I became close with them over the next few months. One day, I heard loud banging on my door and when I opened it, Stephen was there, looking wretched. He rushed in and said he couldn’t wait another minute to tell me that he was in love with me. Well, I was in love with him too but he lived with his girlfriend, who had become my friend. He said he had to be with me and was going home to get his things and would come back to stay with me.” I think sadly of the unnamed girlfriend, knowing well what it feels like when the love you rely on is redirected to another woman. “To spend the night or to move in with you?” I asked. “To move in, because he couldn’t stay with the girlfriend once he told her about me. So he left to go back uptown,” she continues. “Wait, so he comes, declares his love for you, you say yes same and then he just leaves?” I ask. “Yes, I guess so,” she says. “You didn’t sleep with him first? This man appears at your door, you admit your feelings for each other and then nothing else?” I ask dubiously. “I guess I slept with him,” she says contemplatively. Alexandra and I howl with laughter. I ask if she’s being coy or if she really can’t recall. “OK fine, I slept with him. But then he left and was supposed to come right back and he didn’t. He was gone for hours. I was crushed but of course I had no way to reach him because I couldn’t call his apartment. I assumed he had decided to stay with his girlfriend. Well, he finally appeared and do you know where he had been?” she asks. “Outside on the street collecting his things after his girlfriend threw them out the window?” I ask. “No, he had stopped at a bar to watch the Super Bowl. It was the first year of the Super Bowl and a very big deal. He came over after it ended,” she says triumphantly.

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

  I eked out a few clumsy sentences, not knowing how to speak a language of loss and love and lust, and carefully watched the clock until I had met my five-minute daily requirement. The next day I repeated the process, deleting most of what I had written the day before and replacing it with language that gradually, over the course of days and then weeks and months, became more confident and fluent. I was in fact learning an entirely new language, translating my complex web of emotions and experiences into the written word. My goal was to be raw and real when I had to be, but mostly to be funny. I had plenty of amusing anecdotes about my dating trials and travails and I envisioned a breezy page-turner of the kind I was too much of a literary snob to read myself. Though the pages I was writing were slowly accumulating, I had no intention of sharing them outside my small circle of friends. I had kids and parents and a soon-to-be ex-husband with whom I was working hard to peacefully co-parent and the idea of publicly sharing my sexual escapades and most intimate thoughts terrified me. What I looked like on the outside was different from who I was turning into under the façade, I knew, and I neither understood why anyone else would care, nor why I should feel so bold as to reveal myself this way. I told one of my friends I was going to stop, but she persuaded me to keep going as the writing process would be cathartic, if nothing else. I reluctantly agreed. By now I had grown to both love and hate the process of writing, and could procrastinate like I was aiming for a world record, but was fascinated by how my often confused and unspoken feelings found words and meaning on the written page. So, I kept writing, friends read my pages and cheered me on and eventually a book took shape. It did not come out as I had intended. The zippy story of the single, middle-aged mother-of-three striking out and finding her sexual mojo was not, in fact, the only story I had to tell. The deeper story was how I came to the revelation that I had become complacent in my married life, beatifically coasting through it while roiling underneath was a woman yearning to live life on her own terms. My story, ultimately, is not simply an amusing collection of anecdotes about my sexual escapades, though these are certainly plentiful, but a narrative of how I gradually shifted roles from wife and mother to woman with a rich and complex private life. Still, like so many other women, I seek approval from those close to me and also from strangers. I’m a rule follower and a pleaser.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  39.That night I went out to the rocks even though he said he wouldn’t be there. Where was he in the ocean? I pictured him breathing under the waves. I imagined him lying in a sand bed on the seafloor in pure, total darkness. He was sleeping. His eyes were closed and he was faintly smiling. I wanted to be there with him, in quietude, a better abyss than the one up here. I wanted to swim to the bed and curl up beside him, kiss him on the forehead, the water rippling out around us, brining us both. A passing submarine rang above us. It was my phone. I looked at it. I didn’t recognize the number so I didn’t answer. But I held it up to my ear and pretended that I could talk to Theo through the waves. What would I say to him? How are you? Who are you? Are you me? There were so many questions I had for him that I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to puncture what we had. I feared chasing him away with curiosity and neediness—too much of a desire to pin him down—when he was already giving me so much. I didn’t want to know his limits, where his dimensions—both physical and emotional—began and ended. I wondered who else could see him as I saw him. I didn’t know the exact constraints of his world or his existence and I didn’t want to fracture it. My greatest fear was that I would make him disappear. Was this how it was with all men? Did they all exist in a totally different reality—one in which you couldn’t ask certain questions or the spell would be broken? But it was the same for me. When a man held me at arm’s length I wanted him. But if he came closer, stayed too close for too long, the spell was broken for me: the myth dissolved. He wasn’t who I thought he was. What was love without the spell? The spell was broken for me around Jamie. It broke twice: once before the breakup, re-congealing in my need for him, and again now. He’d been frantically texting me every day. This contact, his pursuit, which had gotten me so high just weeks before, only bored me now. I no longer felt excited by being chosen by him. Even the prospect of being the other woman, a hot escape from Megan the scientist, did nothing for me. It only hammered home my feelings around the need for distance in love. He only wanted me because I was far.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Now I had to pretend the spaces left blank in her text were intentional. I could theorize this into being, hopefully convincing readers that the poems could be read in this way. It was true, we didn’t want to project our narratives onto her work. Academically, my conceit was interesting enough. But there was no way to deny that something beautiful and magical had once accompanied the poems and now was lost forever. The nothingness had once been full of music. The surfers began to come in, but there was no sign of Theo. I always wondered where the surfers put their keys, their wallets. Out of all the things they did—choosing a wave, standing up on their boards, staying on their boards, somehow not dying—it seemed the most interesting to me where they put their stuff. Did they have secret compartments in their wet suits? Wouldn’t their phones get ruined? Maybe they didn’t bring their phones. There were definitely a lot of girls waiting to get texted back. I waited for hours, but Theo never came. He was probably avoiding me. Or maybe he was on land, out with a bunch of other young people. I imagined them drinking beer on a roof somewhere, setting off fireworks. The group laughed in unison, the tinkling of their voices echoing in the brisk Venice air. They didn’t give a fuck about anything. He was at the center of the group, lighting the fireworks and grinning. No, he was sitting over to the side of the group, sullen and mysterious. There were girls in the group—surfer girls with long beach hair, who smelled like vanilla and coconut. They wanted him. They wanted him for his distance. In turns they each came over to him, offering a hit off a joint, or a beer. He could have any of them he wanted. He could kiss them right there, up on the roof, and then lead them by the hand inside the house. But as each girl approached him, he held up his hand, silently. What an asshole, really. Why was he so sullen? Was he thinking about someone else? I pretended he was thinking about me. It made me happy for a moment. Then I felt a flush of shame for being so stupid. I went back inside and fell asleep cradling Dominic. I had given my power away to Garrett and I didn’t like the feeling. It reminded me of the past year with Jamie, only Garrett was someone much stupider. It was like I had taken that longing for Jamie and transplanted it onto the next closest body. How had I ended up here again? When I woke up in the middle of the night I had to pee like a motherfucker. I raced to the toilet and sat down, but nothing would come out. I squeezed out a few drops and they burned. Uh oh. I crawled back into bed hoping it wasn’t what I thought it was.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I looked up to her, and my world had already been so destroyed by the death of my mother that I couldn’t afford to be angry with her. But it hurt, nonetheless. So instead I judged myself. I made myself wrong for needing someone, for revealing that need. I needed more than the universe could give me. Clearly my feelings were too big for the universe to hold, too disgusting. I would not put them out there like that again. I didn’t even want to have to feel them myself. Well, now I was feeling again and I did not want Annika coming home. If she returned there was no way I could just wander out to the ocean alone at night. I guess I could still go to the rocks and not tell her where I was going—I could lie and say I was going across town or to a café to see some acoustic guitar bullshit. But if she saw me out the window, what would I say I was doing? She would start asking questions. Also, I had a new fantasy. I wanted to ask Theo if he would maybe come with me to the house and stay for a night. I didn’t know how I would get him there. Certainly he couldn’t drag himself across the beach. I doubted he would want me to carry him. But maybe I could get one of those little sand-wagon things, or a bicycle with a wagon on the back. I had already planned this visit, fully, in my head. I wanted to have sex with him on a bed. I didn’t even care if he slept over or not. I just wanted a place to be with him where we could relax that wasn’t freezing and where we weren’t looking around for people to catch us. The way I felt when we kissed or when he went down on me—I wanted to create that feeling and live in that for as long as I could. I wanted to build a tent of it in the warmth of my sister’s house: a container where I could bottle the feeling, like a little ship, and hold the glow. Here was a bit of magic that could happen in my life. After all the nothingness, maybe this fantasy was worth living for. I suppose that whenever you’re addicted to something, this is what they mean when they say you forget about the consequences and don’t care about the other side. All I cared about was my plan. 31. I decided to skip group. I was too deeply involved with Theo now. What would I even tell them? I’d met a merman who might disprove all of their theories about love? And why would I choose to recover unless everything was total and complete shit? If there was one sparkle, one possibility of getting as high as I could get off a person, why would I throw that potentiality away?

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

  It seems silly to me now that I had felt hopeful, lying in bed with the man I was hoping would be #1 on a long list of men. It seemed effortless to feel a spark of confidence in my potential to find happiness as I came down from the high of my first orgasm in who knows how long – but now, in the quiet of my day-to-day life, I feel abandoned by both Michael and my own burgeoning self. Georgia and I walk through the market that’s part of the farm where she attends day camp. We come in here every afternoon after camp to inhale the scent of freshly baked bread and choose an ice pop for a treat. I notice a familiar-looking man standing by the salad bar and my gaze lingers a moment too long so that he catches and returns it as we try to figure out if we know each other. He is maybe ten years older than me, with a salt and pepper goatee, deep lines around his eyes and tattoos creeping beyond the short sleeves of his T-shirt. I squint trying to place him and then, having no choice but to follow Georgia who is making a beeline for the salad bar, walk toward him. “Oh, Johnny!” I loudly exclaim, relieved to have finally made the connection. “Hey Laura, I thought that might be you. It’s been so long.” We smile warmly at each other and embrace in a quick hug. Johnny had been my contractor years earlier when we were in the midst of a house renovation. He had been in and out of my house for weeks, and one night showed up at about 9pm in his pickup truck with his German Shepherd hanging out the passenger window. He said he wanted to see how the outdoor lights looked after dark, so we turned them all on and stood outside while my son threw sticks for his dog to fetch. I had suspected that he had a crush on me as the night-time visit seemed odd, and often he had idled in the house for what seemed a little longer than necessary to chat with me after he was done for the day. Now he expresses surprise at how big Georgia has gotten and tells me he’s been working at a job close by. When I ask how he’s doing, he shakes his head, saying this has been a terrible year, that he’d been in a near-fatal motorcycle accident and recovered to find out that he had lung cancer, so surgery and treatments and a difficult recovery ensued. “Yikes, what a year, I’m sorry. You look healthy but thinner, which is why I guess I didn’t recognize you right away. You’re so tough, I have no doubt you’ll be back to your robust self soon.” “Well, Laura, I’m getting better and stronger every day. God is good, and I’m grateful. How are you?

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  2During those long, anxious weeks in Cornwall, it was borne in on Stephen as never before how wide was the gulf between her and her mother, how completely they two must always stand divided. Yet looking at Anna’s quiet ageing face, the girl would be struck afresh by its beauty, a beauty that seemed to have mollified the years, to have risen triumphant over time and grief. And now as in the days of her childhood, that beauty would fill her with a kind of wonder; so calm it was, so assured, so complete—then her mother’s deep eyes, blue like distant mountains, and now with that far-away look in their blueness, as though they were gazing into the distance. Stephen’s heart would suddenly tighten a little; a sense of great loss would descend upon her, together with the sense of not fully understanding just what she had lost or why she had lost it—she would stare at Anna as a thirsty traveller in the desert will stare at a mirage of water. And one evening there came a preposterous impulse—the impulse to confide in this woman within whose most gracious and perfect body her own anxious body had lain and quickened. She wanted to speak to that motherhood, to implore, nay, compel its understanding. To say: ‘Mother, I need you. I’ve lost my way—give me your hand to hold in the darkness.’ But good God, the folly, the madness of it! The base betrayal of such a confession! Angela delivered over, betrayed—the unthinkable folly, the madness of it. Yet sometimes as Anna and she sat together looking out at the misty Cornish coast-line, hearing the dull, heavy throb of the sea and the calling of sea-gulls the one to the other—as they sat there together it would seem to Stephen that her heart was so full of Angela Crossby, all the bitterness, all the sweetness of her, that the mother-heart beating close by her own must surely, in its turn, be stirred to beat faster, for had she not once sheltered under that heart? And so extreme was her need becoming, that now she must often find Anna’s cool hand and hold it a moment or two in her own, trying to draw from it some consolation.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  During these times we are moving forward in the void, forgetting we are going nowhere, so the void feels less daunting. We feel like we are handling shit. We are handling shit and doing work on ourselves. And then another person comes in, and meets us there, and we think we can handle it. We think we can handle it, because in that moment we feel that we can handle anything. I always thought I could handle things, until I couldn’t. I talked like dying was no big deal, but in that moment I definitely didn’t want to die. It was crazy to be out there. I didn’t know what I was doing. “I should go,” I said. “It’s freezing, and I have to walk my dog.” “Oh, you have a dog?” he said, sounding a little disappointed. This too was strange. Surfer bros always seemed to love dogs. They themselves were like the beautiful carefree mutts of the sea. “Yes. Why?” “No reason,” he said. “Do you have any dogs or cats?” “No,” he said. Then he laughed. “I have fish.” “Fish?” I blurted, and started laughing in spite of myself. “Where do you live?” he asked. “Just across the beach,” I said. “In one of those houses.” I pointed in the general direction of Annika’s house. “Ahhh,” he said. “Venice girl.” “Yeah,” I said. “I live with my sister.” I didn’t tell him that I was from the desert. “Well, if you decide to traipse out to the rocks again late at night, maybe I’ll see you again,” he said. “I’m always out here swimming.” “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “Okay, well, bye. Be safe.” “Bye—you too,” he said. He was still holding on to the rocks when I left. He looked like he didn’t want to let go, but not because he was scared of the waves, just because—I’m not sure why. I walked onto the beach and took my sandals off. When I turned around he was still holding on to the rocks, with his cheek resting on one of them. He waved. When I got back to the house I swore I could still feel his eyes on me. I looked back one more time, but he was gone. I didn’t see him anywhere in the waves. I felt a creepy feeling go up my spine and was glad the dog was waiting for me. “Hi, Domi,” I said, sliding open the glass door. But Dominic didn’t come bounding toward me as usual. Instead he sniffed the air repeatedly and kept his distance. His ears went flat and he growled. I had never seen him like that before and it made me wonder if I was haunted now. He continued to growl, but the sound was cute to me.