#longing

"I miss her like 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, and 5 misses 8. When we made love, our two bodies formed one spiral that seemed to cycle to the sky."

"Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee."

"The Portuguese call it saudade: a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land — all things born of the soul that can only be felt."

"I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals."

"I will never claim to know what you are thinking. I only hope I am on your mind."

"..he wanted her.And at another time, as another man, he would have her. Without hesitation. As lover. . . as more."

"It’s better if you don’t come at all, then come and act like you don’t want to be here. The same applies to there, when I’m there, which is also confusingly here, though it’s not here it’s there."

"Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury."

"Wanting him to come back before anyone notices part of the world has not moved since he left."

"She hardly ever thought of him. He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer."

"And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart—knowing a precious moment had gone and we not there. We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on belfry floor, a remembered voice, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass."

"The days passed in a dream. I pictured our reunion again and again, played it out in my mind over and over until I’d almost worn a groove in my thoughts, so deep that it seemed the only thing I could think of was our reunion. Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair."

"The wind may be invisible, but it’s colored by memories of you, as you gently blew into my life, adding motion and emotion to my still-beating heart."

"The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness."

"There’s nothing like that feeling of waiting for a guy. It’s the loneliest feeling in the world. Holding that cell phone in your hand as you take out the trash, use the bathroom, change the litter box. Fearful that the one second you aren’t looking will be when they call. Pathetic. And something I have done as recently as last week."

"But no one can predict of a certainty what will happen. And none of it will change how I intend to spend the rest of my life. I will live it on my terms. And you... you can have all of me or nothing. I won't be an invalid any longer. Not even if it means losing you."

"Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it inflames the great."

"We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie."

"Just because I'm not forever by your side doesn't mean that's not precisely where I want to be."

"I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be."