reaching

My whole life has been one long longing, and the things I most long for are romance and adventure. By ‘romance’ I don’t necessarily mean romantic love, I mean more like the olden use of the word ‘romance.’ As Rebecca Solnit wrote in A Field Guide to Getting Lost: The word romance once meant this kind of questing journey—“usu. heroic, adventurous, mysterious,” says my dictionary. I guess I just mean adventure. I am always longing for adventure, and always have been. Even during periods of my life when I was constantly out in the world seeing new places and meeting new people, I always wanted more. As an old friend once put it: To tell the truth, I’m lonely for adventure. It hasn’t been away very long, but I get restless fast. The same has always been true of me, and is certainly true now that my life is, by most accounts, less adventurous—I still have adventures, of course, but they’re usually smaller, and the time between them is farther apart. So I put all that longing into my writing: I write memoir and poetry about my romantic past; I write fictional characters who get to go on adventures I’ve never had.

shame (and other words for longing)

I wished [she] would come to me at that moment, or to be honest, I longed for any human being who would hold me until the first ray of sunlight stretched down through the darkness, but the silence deepened.