Radical Center

“Eli Todd died at the age of 23 in October 2016 in Brooklyn, where he lived and worked. He graduated with honors from the creative writing program at Pratt Institute in 2015 and was the recipient of that year’s fiction prize. He taught and worked at Young Writers Workshop, a residential program for high school students run by the University of Virginia. In Eli’s own bio for this journal in 2016, he wrote that he was “interested in ghosts, accents, and weather patterns, especially in relation to his native New England . . . [and was] working on a collection of short stories involving those things.”

Longing, unlike desire, conceals the need for dissatisfaction. What you long for you definitively can’t have. When what’s longed for is “sanity” or “conventionality” or “adulthood,” the mad one longs mostly, I think, to reassure herself that these “responsible” choices are not ones she can — nor can be expected to — make. “All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children… I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life,” said Anne Sexton, whose damnedest looked a lot like dancing the “Dying Swan” in a backyard filled not with balloons but with bottles, and who nonetheless had babies with someone named Alfred. “But,” she added, “one can’t build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.