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 Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  the inventor of the life raft His father, my father claims, invented both the life raft and the power window, though sometimes it is the life raft and the push-button locks on car doors. Or some sort of four-gig carburetor that saves gas . In this story my father’s family is rich, with gardeners and chauffeurs during the Depression. His grandfather owned a roofing company that had the contracts for Faneuil Hall and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—big public works projects that kept them flush while the country struggled. Look inside the grasshopper weathervane on the roof of Faneuil Hall and you will see my great-grandfather’s name, Thaddeus, which is also my brother’s name. My father tells me this, but how to get inside this grasshopper he doesn’t say.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  You asked me what it’s like to be a writer and I’m giving you a mess, I know. But it’s a mess, Ma—I’m not making this up. I made it down. That’s what writing is, after all the nonsense, getting down so low the world offers a merciful new angle, a larger vision made of small things, the lint suddenly a huge sheet of fog exactly the size of your eyeball. And you look through it and see the thick steam in the all-night bathhouse in Flushing, where someone reached out to me once, traced the trapped flute of my collarbone. I never saw that man’s face, only the gold-rimmed glasses floating in the fog. And then the feeling, the velvet heat of it, everywhere inside me. Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us? When Houdini failed to free himself from his handcuffs at the London Hippodrome, his wife, Bess, gave him a long, deep kiss. In doing so, she passed him the key that would save him. If there’s a heaven I think it looks like this. For no reason, I Googled Trevor’s name the other day. The White Pages say he’s still alive, that he’s thirty years old and lives only 3.6 miles from me. The truth is memory has not forgotten us. A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved. — While cleaning my closet one afternoon I found a Jolly Rancher in the pocket of an old Carhartt jacket. It was from Trevor’s truck. He always kept them in his cup holder. I unwrapped it, held it between my fingers. The memory of our voices is inside it. “Tell me what you know,” I whispered. It caught the light from the window like an ancient jewel. I went inside the closet, closed the door, sat down in the tight dark, and placed the candy, smooth and cool, in my mouth. Green Apple. I’m not with you because I’m at war with everything but you. A person beside a person inside a life. That’s called parataxis. That’s called the future. We’re almost there. I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck—the pieces floating, finally legible. Head around the bend, past the second stop sign with “H8” spray-painted in white on the bottom. Walk toward the white house, the one with its left side charcoal-grey with exhaust blown from the scrapyard across the highway.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  SAINTS õ In Russia, the Orthodox Church and the state worked together to recognize local holy men as national saints and fund the building of new churches and monasteries to cement the loyalty of far-flung villages. But sometimes saints developed huge followings on their own, whether the authorities approved or not. õ These saints often lived lives of radical sacrifice. They show how the spirituality of the monastery found its way into ordinary life, especially in the form of strange, charismatic characters known as holy fools. õ A holy fool was a person who rejected the comforts and standards of ordinary society in an outrageous way, perhaps by wandering around without clothes in the dead of winter, or standing in a town square and mocking aristocrats as they passed by. The point was to compel bystanders to question their own assumptions and priorities, and to reflect on the ways that Christ himself was a holy fool in 1st-century Palestine. õ One notable holy fool is Xenia of St. Petersburg, who was born in the 18th century to a wealthy family. She married a colonel in the Russian army, but he died suddenly and left her a widow when she was only 26. Most Russian women of her social rank would have immediately remarried and carried on with a life of frequent teas and balls and evenings at the theater. õ Instead, Xenia started selling off her husband’s estate and all her belongings to raise money to give to the poor. She saved his military uniform and developed the odd habit of putting it on and wandering the streets of St. Petersburg, living as a homeless person and speaking to anyone who would listen about Christ. Her family was so alarmed they hauled her into a hospital to have her head examined, but the doctors found her mentally sound. Lecture 10—Eastern Orthodoxy: From Byzantium to Russia 97 õ She spent the rest of her life—nearly 50 years—living and preaching on the streets, alternately mocked as a crazy woman and venerated as a fool for Christ. After she died, her grave became a shrine. Pilgrims flocked to her grave to pray for miracles. Xenia was a saint long before the church got around to officially canonizing her in 1988. SUGGESTED READING Gillquist, Becoming Orthodox. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution. Ware, The Orthodox Church. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER ä What was at stake in Eastern and Western Christians’ debates over theology? Why couldn’t they just agree to disagree? ä How does the Orthodox Christianity we find in creeds and theology books compare to the faith as believers have actually experienced it? ä Despite the interest of some American evangelicals, Orthodox Christianity has won relatively few converts in the West. What might explain this? 98 The History of Christianity II

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I run thinking I will outpace it all, my will to change being stronger than my fear of living. My chest wet and leaf-raked, the day smoldering up at its edges, I push through so fast I feel like I’ve finally broken out of my body, left it behind. But when I turn around to see the panting boy, to forgive him, at last, for trying and failing to be good, there’s no one there—only the full elms windless at the field’s edge. Then, for no reason, I keep going. I think of the buffaloes somewhere, maybe in North Dakota or Montana, their shoulders rippling in slow motion as they race for the cliff, their brown bodies bottlenecked at the narrow precipice. Their eyes oil-black, the velvet bones of their horns covered with dust, they run, headfirst, together—until they become moose, huge and antlered, wet nostrils braying, then dogs, with paws clawing toward the edge, their tongues lapping in the light until, finally, they become macaques, a whole troop of them. The crowns of their heads cut open, their brains hollowed out, they float, the hair on their limbs fine and soft as feathers. And just as the first one steps off the cliff, onto air, the forever nothing below, they ignite into the ochre-red sparks of monarchs. Thousands of monarchs pour over the edge, fan into the white air, like a bloodjet hitting water. I race through the field as if my cliff was never written into this story, as if I was no heavier than the words in my name. And like a word, I hold no weight in this world yet still carry my own life. And I throw it ahead of me until what I left behind becomes exactly what I’m running toward—like I’m part of a family. “Why didn’t they get you then?” I place the Marlboro back in your mouth. You hold my hand there for a while, breathe, then take it between your fingers. “Oh, Little Dog,” you sigh. “Little Dog, Little Dog.” Monkeys, moose, cows, dogs, butterflies, buffaloes. What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story—when our lives are in themselves the story of animals. “Why didn’t they get me? Well, ’cause I was fast, baby. Some monkeys are so fast, they’re more like ghosts, you know? They just—poof,” you open your palm in a gesture of a small explosion, “disappear.” Without moving your head, you look at me, the way a mother looks at anything—for too long. Then, for no reason, you start to laugh. The past tense of sing is not singed. —Hoa Nguyen Acknowledgments On this page, the line “Freedom . . . is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey” is from Bei Dao’s poem “Accomplices” (The August Sleepwalker). On this page, the line “Two languages . . . beckoning a third” is paraphrased from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  Into—yes, that’s more like it. As in, Now I’m broken into. — The bus’s lights make it feel like a dentist’s office gliding through the wet streets. A woman behind me coughs fitfully between bursts of Haitian-inflected French. There’s a man next to her—husband, brother?—who rarely speaks save for the occasional “Uh-huh” or “Bien, bien.” On the highway, the October trees blur by, branches raking purple sky. In between them, the lampposts of soundless towns hang in fog. We cross a bridge and a roadside gas station leaves a neon throb in my head. When the dark in the bus returns, I look down at my lap and hear his voice. You should stay. I glance up and see the fabric peeling from the top of his truck, the yellow foam spilling out at the tear, and I’m back in the passenger seat. It’s mid-August and we’re parked outside the Town Line Diner in Wethersfield. The air around us dark red, or perhaps that’s how all evenings, rendered in my memory of him, appear. Bludgeoned. “You should stay,” he says, gazing out across the lot, his face smeared with motor oil from his shift at the Pennzoil in Hebron. But we both know I’m leaving. I’m going to New York, to college. The whole point of us meeting was to say goodbye, or rather, just to be side by side, a farewell of presence, of proximity, the way men are supposed to do. We were to go to the diner for waffles, “for old times’ sake,” he said, but when we get there, neither of us moves. Inside the diner, a trucker sits alone over a plate of eggs. On the other side, a middle-aged couple is tucked into a booth, laughing, their arms animated over their oversized sandwiches. A single waitress hovers between the two tables. When the rain starts, the glass warps them, so that only their shades, colors, like impressionist paintings, remain. “Don’t be scared,” his voice says. He stares at the people glowing in the diner. The tenderness in his tone holds me to the seat, the washed-out town. “You’re smart,” he says. “You’re gonna kill it in New York.” His voice sounds unfinished. And that’s when I realize he’s high. That’s when I see the bruises along his upper arms, the veins bulged and blackened where the needles foraged. “Okay,” I say as the waitress gets up to warm up the trucker’s coffee. “Okay, Trevor,” as if agreeing to a task. “They’re old as fuck and they’re still trying.” He almost laughs. “Who?” I turn to him. “That married couple. They’re still trying to be happy.” He is slurring, eyes grey as sink water. “It’s raining like hell and they out there eating soggy Reubens trying to get it right.” He spits into the empty cup and lets out a short, exhausted chuckle. “I bet they’ve been eating the same sandwiches forever.” I smile, for no reason.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  nature available to each and every one of us. There is no need to look for gurus or to grow nostalgic for the past and its certainties. A compass and guidance system does exist. It comes from looking for and discovering the individual purpose to our lives. It is the path taken by the greatest achievers and contributors to the advancement of human culture, and we only have to see the path to take it. Here’s how it works. Each human individual is radically unique. This uniqueness is inscribed in us in three ways—the one-of-a-kind configuration of our DNA, the particular way our brains are wired, and our experiences as we go through life, experiences that are unlike any other’s. Consider this uniqueness as a seed that is planted at birth, with potential growth. And this uniqueness has a purpose. In nature, in a thriving ecosystem we can observe a high level of diversity among species. With these diverse species operating in a balance, the system is rich and feeds off itself, creating newer species and more interrelationships. Ecosystems with little diversity are rather barren, and their health is much more tenuous. We humans operate in our own cultural ecosystem. Throughout history we can see that the healthiest and most celebrated cultures have been the ones that encouraged and exploited the greatest internal diversity among individuals—ancient Athens, the Chinese Sung Dynasty, the Italian Renaissance, the 1920s in the Western world, to name a few. These were periods of tremendous creativity, high points in history. We can contrast this with the conformity and cultural sterility in dictatorships. By bringing our uniqueness to flower in the course of our life, through our particular skills and the specific nature of our work, we contribute our share to this needed diversity. This uniqueness actually transcends our individual existence. It is stamped upon us by nature itself. How can we explain why we are drawn to music, or to helping other people, or to particular forms of knowledge? We have inherited it, and it is there for a purpose. Striving to connect to and cultivate this uniqueness provides us a path to follow, an internal guidance system through life. But connecting to this system does not come easily. Normally the signs of our uniqueness are clearer to us in early childhood. We found ourselves naturally drawn to particular subjects or activities, despite the influence of our parents. We can call these primal inclinations . They speak to us, like a voice. But as we get older, that voice becomes drowned out by parents, peers, teachers, the culture at large. We are told what to like, what is cool, what is not cool. We start to lose a sense of who we are, what makes us different. We choose career paths unsuited to our nature. To tap into the guidance system, we must make the connection to our uniqueness as strong as possible, and learn to trust that voice.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 15. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type T92.4, Girl mistakenly elopes with the wrong lover.16. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type P427.7.2.1.1, Poets and fools closely allied.Dream House as High FantasyAfter that, nothing is the same. At first, it does what it is supposed to do: confirm every single sneaking suspicion you’ve had about your own value for so long. You are lucky to have met her. You are not some weird, desperate mess. You are wanted. Better yet, you are needed. You are a piece of someone’s destiny. You are critical to a larger plan that will span many years, many kingdoms, many volumes. Dream House as Entomology“I know we were doing the polyamory thing when I was with Val,” she says. “But I don’t want to share you with anyone. I love you so much. Can we agree to be monogamous?” You laugh and nod and kiss her, as if her love for you has sharpened and pinned you to a wall. Dream House as Lesbian Pulp NovelThe cover tells you what you need to know. Depraved inversion. Seduction. Lascivious butches and big-breasted seductresses. Love that dare not speak its name. There are censors to get past, so tragedy is a foregone conclusion. It was written into the DNA of the Dream House, maybe even back when it was just a house, maybe even back when it was just Bloomington, Indiana, or just the Northwest Territory, or just the still-uncolonized Miami Nation. Or before humans existed there at all, and it was just raw, anonymous land. You wonder if, at any point in history, some creature scuttled over what would, eons later, be the living room, and cocked its head to the side to listen to the faintest of sounds: yelling, weeping. Ghosts of a future that hadn’t happened yet. Dream House as Lesson LearnedYou have a redheaded aunt, your mother’s closest sister. As a child you not so secretly referred to her as your “scary aunt” because she was known to fly into unpredictable rages; rages that, more often than not, centered on you.17 You dreaded the annual trips to Wisconsin because you knew it meant close proximity to a woman who clearly really hated you and did comically little to hide it. It was a power struggle, which was weird because you had no power at all. You cannot remember a conversation with her in which you weren’t tense, tiptoeing around unseen land mines.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  It becomes clear to me that I’m supposed to console those asking these questions, that they need me to say something that will make them feel better, confirm that there’s nothing for them to do, that the problem is as inscrutable as Africa. Or perhaps they are afraid that homelessness seems more and more to be a fluid state, and they would prefer it to be something one is born into, like India and their Untouchables. Sometimes I point out that eighty percent of the homeless are invisible, like the proverbial iceberg, that when I walk through the city now every other person I see is someone I know from the shelter, but if you didn’t know you’d think they were on their lunch break, enjoying a little sun. Who’s your favorite bum? one girl asks, when she hears I work at Pine Street. I find her and her friend on Boston Common, chatting with Warren, another of the friends I got drunk with at Dreamwold all those years ago, the same Warren I wrote sci-fi with a few years later. He blew into Boston a few weeks earlier, appeared at my door penniless and needing a place to crash, as he will every four years or so for my entire life. These two girls see the same guys every day around Kenmore Square, and they go back and forth as to which is their favorite. Do you know Karl, she asks me, the one with the broken guitar? Even this girl has a bag of old clothes, asks if I can come by sometime. Most of the people I hang with at this point work in the shelter. I’m also killing time with Ivan, a poet in his late thirties, though he hasn’t published much, if anything, and I’ve never read a word. Dark-skinned, tight dreads, solid, Ivan weighs in at over two hundred pounds. I’ll have him over to my apartment in the North End often, and we’ll get high, and when we emerge into the hallway Luca will always be there, changing a lightbulb, though I never see him any other time, except when the rent’s due. Someone in the neighborhood made an emergency call— Black man loose in your building! Ivan and I float down the stairs, Luca looks at us wide-eyed, unable to comprehend how life has gotten so out of control. Ivan and I are negotiating with another landlord to rent an entire building in the Combat Zone, an abandoned strip joint that Ivan tracked down the owner of, and we all meet regularly to hammer out an agreement. We know this new landlord is Mafia, we read about him in the papers, but he treats us all right, and the building is perfect. This strip joint, Good Times, was shut down maybe ten years before by the FBI. The prostitutes literally dragged johns out of their cars as they cruised past. They found that Harvard student in the doorway one morning, stabbed dead.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  their lives easier. We may be in a perfectly satisfying relationship, but our minds continually wander toward a new person, someone who doesn’t have the very real flaws of our partner, or so we think. We dream of being taken out of our boring life by traveling to some culture that is exotic and where people are just happier than in the grimy city where we live. The moment we have a job, we imagine something better. On a political level, our government is corrupt and we need some real change, perhaps a revolution. In this revolution, we imagine a veritable utopia that replaces the imperfect world we live in. We don’t think of the vast majority of revolutions in history in which the results were more of the same, or something worse. In all these cases, if we got closer to the people we envy, to that supposed happy family, to the other man or woman we covet, to the exotic natives in a culture we wish to know, to that better job, to that utopia, we would see through the illusion. And often when we act on these desires, we realize this in our disappointment, but it doesn’t change our behavior. The next object glittering in the distance, the next exotic cult or get-rich-quick scheme will inevitably seduce us. One of the most striking examples of this syndrome is the view we take of our childhood as it recedes into the past. Most of us remember a golden time of play and excitement. As we get older, it becomes even more golden in our memory. Of course, we conveniently forget the anxieties, insecurities, and hurts that plagued us in childhood and more than likely consumed more of our mental space than the fleeting pleasures we remember. But because our youth is an object that grows more distant as we age, we are able to idealize it and see it as greener than green. Such a syndrome can be explained by three qualities of the human brain. The first is known as induction , how something positive generates a contrasting negative image in our mind. This is most obvious in our visual system. When we see some color—red or black, for instance—it tends to intensify our perception of the opposite color around us, in this case green or white. As we look at the red object, we often can see a green halo forming around it. In general, the mind operates by contrasts. We are able to formulate concepts about something by becoming aware of its opposite. The brain is continually dredging up these contrasts. What this means is that whenever we see or imagine something, our minds cannot help but see or imagine the opposite. If we are forbidden by our culture to think a particular thought or entertain a particular desire, that taboo instantly brings to mind the very thing we are forbidden. Every no sparks a corresponding yes. (It was the

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Eliza, on the other hand, is lucky. Well, lucky-ish. Well, luckier. The nettles are stinging nettles, and she has to harvest them from graveyards. And she has to be silent the whole time: silent as she creates the shirts with her raw and blistered hands, silent as a man falls in love with her, silent as they try to burn her for being a witch. And even once she has finished her task, she faints before she can speak, and so her brothers have to speak for her. And the Goose Girl? She survives. She straight-up survives. Yes, the false princess has her beloved talking horse killed and his decapitated head hung from a gate for all to see. Yes, she has to watch someone waltz around with her identity on like a costume, afraid to say what needs to be said. But in the end, with the help of a kindly king and a goose-boy, her truth comes out. She marries her prince and rules with kindness and is happy until the end of her days. Sometimes your tongue is removed, sometimes you still it of your own accord. Sometimes you live, sometimes you die. Sometimes you have a name, sometimes you are named for what—not who—you are. The story always looks a little different, depending on who is telling it. There is a Quichua riddle: El que me nombra, me rompe. Whatever names me, breaks me. The solution, of course, is “silence.” But the truth is, anyone who knows your name can break you in two.8 [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 4. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type S163, Mutilation: cutting (tearing) out tongue.5. Aarne-Thompson-Uther, Classification of Folk Tales, Type 451, The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers.6. Aarne-Thompson-Uther, Classification of Folk Tales, Type 533, The Repressed Bride.7. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type Q172, Reward: admission to heaven.8. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C432.1, Guessing name of supernatural creature gives power over him.Dream House as MenagerieA line has been crossed—you’ve fallen in love. “I have to talk to Val,” she says. “I have to tell her, I have to figure this out. We’ve been together for three years,” she finishes, by way of explanation. And though everything has been on the up-and-up, you feel a weird stab of guilt. This is how emotions work, right? They get tangled and complicated? They take on their own life? Trying to control them is like trying to control a wild animal: no matter how much you think you’ve taught them, they’re willful. They have minds of their own. That’s the beauty of wildness. Dream House as Star-Crossed LoversOne day, a letter arrives. She is rejected from Iowa’s graduate writing program but accepted into Indiana’s. She tells you this with sorrow, over the phone even though you live less than a mile apart. You cry in the privacy of your bedroom. This was inevitable, you think. It’s been great, but it’s over.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The last house—the most perfect—is owned by a beautiful young couple, both redheads, whose children come to the door clutching their mother’s skirt while she stirs a bowl of batter. It is like a fairy tale. Chickens peck in the yard; a beautiful, lanky dog sleeps on the porch. The house is heated by a wood stove. You know the place is impractical—too far from town—but you love it so much your heart aches. It is here—standing under a canopy of trees, watching your girlfriend talk to the husband—that you first admit the fantasy to yourself: that one day the V structure of your relationship will collapse into a heap, and the three of you will be together.9 You put Val on a plane, and then the two of you drive back to Iowa. As farmland scrolls past you, you find yourself imagining a whole new life, a perfect intersection of hedonism and wholesomeness: canning and pickling, writing in front of a fireplace, the three of you tangled in a bed. Fighting with your kids’ guidance counselor. Explaining to your children that other families may not look like yours, but that doesn’t mean something is wrong. Most kids would give anything to have three moms. You catch yourself mourning already. You look over at her. “Let’s take one more road trip together,” she says. [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 9. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type T92.1, The triangle plot and its solutions.Dream House as EroticaIn the late spring, you surprise yourself by asking her to cover your mouth as you come. She does, pressing a firm palm against your crescendoing howl, and it’s as if the sound is being pushed back into your body so that it might suffuse your every molecule. When you are ebbing, and try to inhale but can’t, she lets go, and you can feel the lingering tingle of unlanguage. After this, you ask her to talk to you in a low, raspy stream while she fucks you, and she does: switching effortlessly between English and French, muttering about her cock and how it’s filling you up, pushing her hand over your face and grabbing the architecture of your jaw to turn it this way and that. She shaves her cunt smooth, and it glows like the inside of a conch shell. She loves wearing a harness; you suck her off that way and she comes like it’s real, bucking and lifting off the mattress. You don’t know what is more of a miracle: her body, or her love of your body. She haunts your erotic imagination. You are both perpetually wet. You fuck, it seems, everywhere: beds and tables and floors; over the phone. When you are physically next to each other, she loves to marvel over your differences: how her skin is pale as skim milk and yours, olive; how her nipples are pink and yours are brown. “Everything is darker on you,” she says. You would let her swallow you whole, if she could.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  From the lip of the bowl, up top, it looked more treacherous and lively than it turned out to be. The cleared overlook at the tip of the trail, Massai Point, is named for a Chiricahua Apache man who stole a horse out from under the droopy mustache of a settler. The startled, righteous white man gathered up some of his buddies and they stood at the point and watched for the Apache to show the top of his head. Rifles poised and scanning, they kept their eyes peeled. From the overlook there are a hundred thousand gaps and crevices between the balanced monoliths and stacked boulders. Breathing into the granite walls, hands flat and calming against the heaving sides of his new horse, he waited them out, watching the sky darken and the moon lift its face. They got tired of waiting and rode back to their settlement, miffed at the giant sheltering landscape, the defiant stone thumbs that hid wild Indians in their shadows. This is daytime. My soap opera is on right now, somewhere. Back in Iowa. My people are roaming back and forth on the television screen, all prepared for any kind of upheaval; there are a lot of chiffon dresses and dyed-to-match shoes. I mention to Eric that my show is on. He turns with a grin and watches me ski down a dissolving patch of trail. Loose rocks roll beneath my feet as I’m carried along. This is elementary physics, ancient Egyptians used it to take house-size rocks here and there, up and down various hills. I skid one foot halfway under an overhanging rock and a curled ribbon of skin peels up my leg. Rattlers hang out under rocks, waiting for a shin to come along. Yee-ikes. I pull my lower leg back out where it belongs and start making an enormous deal out of my injury. Eric sprinkles water on it and yawns. He remembers that we’re an hour off down here, the soap is already over. The air turns tangy and alive, the sun is gone, the sky is black. Glimmers of light bristle forward in the dome above the coyote’s head. He moves out. The night has a seething quality, a crisp silence that hides the tunneling of small, cowering mammals, the slumped somnolence of the wandering cattle, the wide-eyed jitters of the stick-leg deer. The moon, from the bitter cold of outer space, croons to the griddle of the desert. The coyote listens and turns to the west. An image has moved forward in his head: Out of the murk a picture comes to the forefront, melting into view. The thick, spongy edges of lightness, the dark legs and face, the palpable panic of the herd. The sheep are waiting. The moon pushes him forward from behind and snakes slide under bushes until he passes. Out of nowhere a skunk appears, startled, hunkering low with wide mirrored eyes.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  Surely I only imagine now, from this distance, that there was longing in his voice as he spoke, surely I didn’t hear it then, when I turned to him and put my arms around him and buried my face in his chest, as I was still young enough to do, when he wrapped his arms around me in turn, holding me even as I could feel him withdraw into his own reverie or contemplation. But I do hear it, the longing I think he felt as he drifted away from me and from the scene we inhabited together, which must have seemed so different to him, for whom it was the life he had escaped. It was only six months or so before the day when I left my classroom and walked into the September heat that I learned fully both the extent of his longing and the full measure of what he had fled. My sisters had come to visit me in Sofia, my half sisters, the two daughters my father had with his second wife. They were more than a decade younger than I, and I had always felt an overwhelming tenderness for them, which competed with the envy I felt of the love my father showed them so freely. This was especially true of the youngest, G., whom my father loved as he had loved none of the rest of us; he delighted in her swiftness when she was a child, the way she sped about the house, quieting only when he caught her and gathered her in his arms. It was G. who one night told us the stories he had shared with her, stories I couldn’t remember ever having heard, though occasionally some note in what she said struck as if at a distance a familiar tone. We hadn’t seen one another for years, and in that time my father’s second marriage had failed, ending what had always seemed to me my sisters’ good fortune. One of them was just out of college, the other still studying, and I was shocked at the sight of them; they were competent and adult, elegant, with a sophistication I could never dream of having. We were in the main room of my apartment, the common room and kitchen, surrounded by the detritus of a gathering we had had; we sat with half a bottle of wine, two of us at the table and G. alone on the couch. We had let the room go almost dark, only a few candles were still burning, and through the windows the lights of the neighboring blokove were lovely, now that the gray of their concrete had faded into the night. It was my birthday, we had all been drinking, but G. with an abandon I watched with concern.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Memory Palace From the street, here is the house. There is a front door, but you never go in the front door. Here is what lines the driveway: all the boys who liked you as a girl. Colin, the dentist’s son, who told you in a soft voice that your dress was beautiful. You looked down to confirm for yourself, and then skipped merrily away. (A diva, even then! Your mother told you this story; you were so young you did not remember it on your own.) Seth, who, in sixth grade, bought you the brand-new Animorphs book—the one where Cassie transmogrifies into a butterfly on the cover—and had his mother drive him to your house so he could give it to you. Adam, your beloved friend who worked at the local movie theater and brought home garbage bags of day-old popcorn so you could watch movies your parents would never let you see: Memento and Dancer in the Dark and Pulp Fiction and Mulholland Drive and Y Tu Mamá También . Adam burned you so many CDs. Some of them were too weird for you. There was one band who just destroyed instruments into microphones, and you rolled your eyes and said, “This is stupid.” But then Adam’s mom took both of you to Philadelphia in January to see a Godspeed You! Black Emperor concert. The band started late, and you huddled together in a shared hoodie. The music was byzantine, kaleidoscopic, inexpressibly beautiful. You didn’t know how to even talk about the mix of audio and sound, the way the symphony of it washed over you, vibrated every part of your body. Once, Adam wrote a story about you and later, a song, when you went away to college. You did not know what to do with Adam’s love, the steady and undemanding affection of it. Then, Tracey, who had a twin brother, Timmy. They were Mormon and sweet, and you had a crush on Timmy, but Tracey had a crush on you. You once ordered a free Book of Mormon from the internet and ended up having a two-hour-long conversation with a young guy—he sounded so handsome—who was calling from Salt Lake City to gauge your interest in their religion. You couldn’t say, “I ordered it because I am in love with one half of a set of Mormon twins and the other half has a crush on me.” So instead, you bantered about theology for two hours before you regretfully got off the phone. Anyway, those boys. You were suspicious of their feelings because you had no reason to love yourself—not your body, not your mind. You rejected so much gentleness. What were you looking for? The back patio: college. So many unrequited crushes, and—ultimately—the worst sex. You once drove across four states to sleep with a man in upstate New York in the dead of winter. It was so cold your drugstore-brand astringent face wash froze in its tube. The sex was bad, obviously, but what you remember most clearly is what you wanted from that night. You wanted that drive-across-four-states desire. You wanted someone to be obsessed with you. How could you accomplish that? You were awake all night staring at the streetlight in the parking lot outside his bedroom window. Why did men never own curtains? How do you get someone you want to want you? Why did no one love you? The kitchen: OkCupid, Craigslist. Living in California and trying to date women, but failing because Bay Area lesbians proved to be pretty testy about the whole bisexual thing. So then, a parade of men: sweet men and terrible men and older men. Professionals and students. An astrophysicist, several programmers. One guy with a boat in the Berkeley marina. Then, moving to Iowa and going on a bunch of terrible dates, including with a man you kept seeing later in the waiting room of your therapist’s office. He played piano. A med student, maybe? You can barely remember. The living room, the office, the bathroom: boyfriends, or something approximating them. Casey and Paul and Al. Casey was the worst. Al was the kindest. Paul was knock-you-sideways perfect; he fucked you and fed you and tried to teach you to love California. It was all you ever wanted. He was so pretty. You loved his downy ass, his surprisingly soft scruff, the strength of his hands. You wanted to crawl up inside him and have him crawl up inside you. He made you feel special and sexy and smart. He broke up with you because he didn’t love you, which is a very good reason to break up with somebody, even though at the time you wanted to die. The bedroom: don’t go in there.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  Which is what people crave in sex, isn’t it? To be known fully and still loved, still embraced, still accepted. We read that in this city, “nothing impure will ever enter it.”10 Isn’t that what sex is supposed to be for people in its greatest moment? When it is free from power and coercion and manipulation and agendas and fears, when it is simply two people giving all of themselves to each other, holding nothing back? We read in John’s account that there is a tree of life in this city, and that “the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”11 The healing of the nations is the dream of the Jewish prophets, the dream of God—for everybody to finally get along. No war, no conflict, no strife. Harmony between all of humanity. Isn’t that the dream of any relationship? Isn’t that why people continue to step into relationships, even when they’ve been hurt time and time again? Because we still find new ways to hope that there, we will finally get along with somebody. All of us connected with each other in one giant global embrace. We read that in this city, “no longer will there be any curse.”12 The curse is a reference to the entrance of death into the human story in the garden of Eden. This curse is everywhere we look. Even the best possible relationships have a certain ache to them because someday, inevitably, one person is going to stand over the casket of the other. It all ends there. For everyone. For many people, sex is brief moments when everything is okay with the world, even if it isn’t. It’s escape from the pain and suffering and brokenness of life. It’s a short time when all is right, even if lots of things around us are falling apart. In Revelation, God announces, “I am making everything new!”13 Isn’t that the longing of every embrace, every act of love, sex itself? To start again, to give yourself away, again, to try again for hope and healing and restoration? We find sex so powerful because it provides people with glimpses into the world we all desperately desire but can’t seem to create on our own. Which raises a few questions. If marriage has a purpose, to bring hope to the world, what happens when the world doesn’t need hope? What happens to marriage when every hope has been fulfilled? If sex is about connection, what happens when everybody is connected with everybody else? If marriage is about the man and the woman filling each other in, complementing each other, bone of bones and flesh of flesh, what happens when the man and woman are complete in and of themselves? What happens when everything we need from each other we have in God? What happens in the presence of God when we are everything we were originally created to be?

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  Love is risky. If she decides to love him, she runs the huge risk that she might have her heart broken. And this risk does not end with marriage, with going through the wall and leaving home. Later in the Song of Songs, it appears that this couple is married. He comes to her at night. “Open to me . . . my darling . . . my head is drenched with dew, my hair with the dampness of the night . . .”2 Now there is all sorts of commentary by scholars on what is going on here, but the general belief is that he’s been gone—farming, fighting, traveling—doing something that has brought him back in the middle of the night. Normally he would stay somewhere else rather than wake her up. But he returns to their bedroom and knocks. She responds, “I have taken off my robe—must I put it on again? I have washed my feet—must I soil them again?” What’s interesting about her words is that they translate from the Hebrew language, “I have a headache.”3 This is the awkward, real-life stuff that happens every day in relationships. She’s tired, and getting out of bed right now seems like such a hassle. It’s been a long day, she’s exhausted. Her reaction is, “Anytime but now.” But then she catches herself. Like we all do. Do you ever have those moments when you hear yourself talking, almost from outside of your body, and the second you finish, you’re already starting the next sentence, which is, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. Please forget I said that. What I meant was . . .”? She says, “My heart began to pound for him. I arose to open for my beloved . . . but my beloved had left; he was gone.” And then she adds, “My heart sank at his departure.” She’s too slow, and he’s gone. He extended himself, he risked, he called to her from the other side of the door, and he got a no. Who doesn’t know this feeling? She discovers that he’s split, and she says, “I looked for him but did not find him.” Now she’s the one risking, searching, trying to find him. And coming up empty. The heart has tremendous capacity to love, and to ache. And this ache is universal. Universal Sisterhood You can put women from all over the world with nothing in common in a room together and they may not have a thing to talk about until one of them says, “And then he cheated on me,” and instantly you have universal sisterhood. Think of the poems, songs, plays, movies, novels across the ages that have dealt with this pain. Everybody understands it.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I turn on my side on the hard picnic table and look at Eric. He is awake, watching me. He knows the desert is making me sad, that I have these moments; he smiles and moves up close. I can feel the sky on my face, the warm flannel of the desert floor below. I can feel the face of the man beside me. In the silence of the monument he begins whispering the names of the constellations while I listen: Cygnus the Swan, Pegasus the Horse, Canis Major the Great Dog, Cassiopeia, Arcturus. I am on planet Earth. They are near. He pulls in the scent with loud snorts, running from bush to rock to bush again. This is a clearing, a high naked spot. On the distant rise, just ahead, waiting, they are still invisible, but the scent rises in the air around him, palpable as mist. He opens his mouth wide and stands frozen, ears back, eyes pressed shut. The dirt beneath his pads is hard and dry, devoid, the moon is gone. As the mist rises around him, the sound comes forth, pulled from tendon and muscle. It pushes itself through his lungs and into the night, a long trembling wail, dying slowly, drifting finally, without his help, dissipating. Still frozen, he listens for a moment to the roaring silence, waiting, and slowly the sound moves back toward him, fainter, broken into parts like music. Many voices. They are ahead of him, in the high clearing where the deer sometimes sleep, pausing to listen, ready to bring him in with the radar of their voices. He begins running again and gravity relinquishes its hold. The terrain becomes buoyant and he soars low over the ground, like a night bird, a skipped stone. The tent is completely dark. I am floating on the ocean in a canoe, each dip of the oar pours out a panful of light, beneath the surface small silver minnows hover like aircraft. My big collie roams along the shore, following the boat, whining low in her throat, stamping her white paws against the sand. I row toward the beach, casting light behind me, and she begins to bark. I am awake suddenly in the darkness. Outside the tent is the padding of feet, around and around, a swift turning, a pause. There is something in our campsite, trying to get our food. Eric startles and wakes, I touch his hair, breathe into his ear. The paws turn again, there is loud panting, the low whine, and then a series of barks and yelps, a prolonged terrible howl. It is deafening and wild, I can feel him out there, conjuring hysteria out of the dark. A long, plaintive keening, and suddenly it ends, drifting off, carried away from us. We are breathing low and shallow, resting on our elbows. When the reply comes he joins in, barking first and then crying, pitched high then low, the howl of loneliness and communion.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  Small quail run across the path, back and forth, stopping and starting, murmuring and pecking. In the distance one cactus stands apart, reaching at least two feet taller than any of the others, a surly foreman, the dad of the landscape. I want to go see it, see how tall it is compared to me. Eric has a forked stick that he’s using for a divining rod. “It’ll come in handy for snakes,” he tells me, “and show us where there’s water.” The stick suddenly lifts in the air and starts shaking, he manages to hold on and push it back down. “I accidentally pointed it towards the bathrooms,” he says. The camper people are out with their little dog. The guy has a garden hose that he’s spraying the path with because he doesn’t want dust from cars to get on his Astroturf rug. I feel like talking to him but he just nods without smiling and we have to keep walking. He points the hose politely in another direction until we’re past, and the poodle barks and barks. I tell Eric I wish I had a little dog like that one. “Of course you do,” he answers, “that’s the one thing you’re short on.” Three dogs mingle and mill somewhere in the vast universe, in Iowa, wondering why we’re not there petting them. I muse on this for a while. A big dog, a medium-size dog, and a charming lapdog with a mean streak. “They don’t even know we’re gone,” I tell Eric, “they think we went in the other room and just haven’t come back yet.” The minds of dogs interest me, the way they never bother to anticipate problems. By the time we get to the tall cactus the light has softened to a benign burn, a warm pat on the head. We both look great all of a sudden, stained brown with pink auras. Eric sets down his stick and moves back to get the whole cactus in the frame, with me standing at the base for comparison. At the very top of the saguaro a crista has formed over some kind of damage. The scar blooms out, hard and dark green, like the tiny head on a giant. I step over the debris at the base and arrange myself with arms out, bent at the elbow. The cactus is very old and very tall; up close it is hard and weathered and looks important; a cactus emeritus. I stand in the soft, end-of-day shadow and have my picture taken. It feels like being on Mars here, the light is strange, these green men stand all over the terrain. Ninety-three million miles due west, the sun continues to shoot off its bottle rockets. The desert has edged away now, out of range. At the foot of the saguaro, a snake, without moving anything but the thread of tongue, gently touches shoe leather, considers it, and decides no.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  And there I’d be, while they snored up one side and down the other in the room across the hall. I’d tiptoe all over the bedroom, gazing for a while out the window, watching the sky turn black, the stars come out. I’d quietly open all the drawers of all the dressers in the room, take out things, examine them, put them back. I didn’t dare jump on the bed, although sometimes I said “Chicka-chicka China” to myself out of boredom. I tried counting sheep like on the cartoons, but I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t for the life of me imagine what sheep looked like. I knew but I didn’t know, just as I couldn’t conjure up the faces of my long-lost parents and siblings. I was wide-awake, staring out at the vast Milky Way while the grown-ups snored on and on and the moon rose and sank. The strange thing was, I always asked to go there. I don’t remember them ever inviting me, or my parents suggesting it. It was me. From far away the idea of their house was magical to me, all those nooks, all those crannies, all those things to play with — the button jars, the lowboy with a little drawer full of marbles, the flower arrangements, the rotating fan. So, every July I got dropped off on a Sunday and picked up the following Sunday. By Tuesday I’d be counting the hours, sitting on the backyard glider, staring at the black lawn jockey and the flagstone path that took you to the garden, the broken bird bath with a pool of rusty, skanky water in it. Their yard had as much stuff in it as their house did, only the yard stuff was filthy, full of dirt and rainwater. The last time I went there my parents drove off on a Sunday afternoon as I stood on the gravel sidewalk and waved, already regretting my visit. My grandma fed us, dinner was the usual ordeal of gravy rivulets and tainted food, and then they turned Bonanza on. I lay on the living room floor, in the cleared-out space in the center; on either end of the couch were Grandma and Ralph. She was knitting an afghan and he was sharpening a stack of scissors. We were watching my favorite show. The dad, Ben, had a buckskin, Hoss had a black horse, and Little Joe had a pinto pony. They had Hop Sing for a servant, in place of a mom. Back home my little brother would be humming to himself through the whole show, “Umbuddy-umbuddy-umbuddy-ummm Bonanza,” and everyone would be telling him to shut up. My mom would be smoking her cigarettes and drinking beer out of a bottle, my dad would have his socks off and be stretching his bare toes, drinking his beer out of a glass. My sister would be trying to do homework at the dining room table.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Flannery looked forward to every visit and felt pangs of emptiness when he left. In May of 1954, on one of his visits he told her he was taking a six-month leave from his job to return to Denmark, and he suggested they take a good-bye car ride through the county, their favorite activity. It was dusk, and in the middle of nowhere he parked the car on the side of the road and leaned over to kiss her, which she gladly accepted. It was short, but for her quite memorable. She wrote to him regularly and, clearly missing him, kept discreetly referencing their car rides and how much they meant to her. In January 1955, she began a story that seemingly poured out of her in a few days. (Normally she was a careful writer who put stories through several drafts.) She called it “Good Country People.” One of the characters is a cynical young woman with a wooden leg. She is romanced by a traveling salesman of Bibles. She suddenly lets down her guard and allows him to seduce her, playing her own game with him. As they are about to make love in a hayloft, he begs her to remove her wooden leg, as a sign of her trust. This seems far too intimate and a violation of all her defenses, but she relents. He then runs away with the leg, never to return. In the back of her mind she was aware that Erik was somehow extending his stay in Europe. The story was her way of coping with this, caricaturing the two of them as the salesman and the cynical crippled daughter who had let down her guard. Erik had taken her wooden leg. By April she felt his absence rather keenly and wrote to him, “I feel like if you were here we could talk about a million things without stopping.” But the day after she mailed this she received a letter from him announcing his engagement to a Danish woman, and he told her of their plans to return to the States, where he would take up his old job. She had intuited such an event would happen, but the news was a shock nonetheless. She replied with utmost politeness, congratulating him, and they wrote to each other for several more years, but she could not get over this loss so easily. She had tried to protect herself from any deep feelings of parting and separation because they were too unbearable for her. They were like small reminders of the death that would take her away at any moment, while others would go on living and loving. And now those very feelings of separation came pouring in. Now she knew what it was like to experience unrequited love, but for her it was different—she knew that this was the last such chance for her and that her life was to be led essentially alone, and it made it all doubly poignant.