Other people’s words about … unrequited desire

My husband saw me watching him over dinner each night and never asked me what was on my mind. Maybe he knew it was all terrible, unfathomable. Maybe he knew me better than I realised. And isn’t that a perfect cruelty. And isn’t that a marriage. Two people locked in a box together. I still talk to him, Violet, as much as I talk to you. Even a mouse in a trap will self-amputate rather than remain stuck, I tell him. if you’d only touched me, I tell him. All that summer I was dying over and over, I tell him, but I’m only telling the air, the empty room.

from ‘Cursed Bread‘
by Sophie Mackintosh

I don’t think I’ve ever read a more powerful, fevered narrative of desire than the story that Sophie Mackintosh’s narrator, Elodie, tells in Cursed Bread. Elodie desires her husband, who once desired her but doesn’t any longer. She desires him and she tries to make him desire her. She kisses him. She touches him. She climbs on top of him. He rolls away every time, which only makes her desire grow stronger.

Elodie’s longing for her husband, and her longing for him to long for her, is not the only thing that Mackintosh’s novel is about, but — for me, at least — it is the most powerful element of the story. I’ve been looked at in pity and in fear and I’ve learned that the only way to really be seen is through desire, Elodie writes. To be looked at and found whole. Found alive. Please look at me. I promise you that I am here.

Summer bike ride, Aldinga, January 2024.

There is an element of tragedy here that the only way Elodie can imagine herself being acknowledged and seen is as a sexual being, and yet this, too, rings true to me. As she herself might say: And isn’t this the story of desire. Isn’t this the story of every woman who has ever wanted to be seen.

At fifty-three, I find myself intrigued by stories about desire in a way that I wasn’t as a younger woman. Perhaps it’s because I understand at last how much we, all of us — all of us women, at least — long to be seen. Perhaps it’s also because I understand at last how easy it is to confuse being desired (and desirable?) with being seen.

Hospital waiting room, February 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

• • The present tense can exacerbate both bad prose and loose ideas; to harness it like a flashlight and not a hammer requires delicacy: In this fascinating piece, Grace Bryon explores trans literature (including whether it exists, or should exist, at all) through exploring fiction written in the present tense. I found Bryon’s essay interesting on two levels — both her discussion of what trans lit is or isn’t and her discussion of what makes any writing good (or not).
  
  
  • One habit that those born between 1997 and 2012 are keen to endorse is reading –- and it’s physical books rather than digital that they are thumbing: Chloe MacDonnell explores the apparent love that Gen Z have for reading print books and asks, is it a genuine response to the noise they experience from the digital world, or is it merely a performative love (which, presumably, contributes to the digital noise)?
  
  
  • Adulthood, in any case, is a socially constructed concept that varies across places and times: Lila Shapiro explores age-gap relationships.
  
  
  • I sensed that the overworked and underpaid health care professionals I saw didn’t believe I was seriously ill because I wasn’t producing the beginnings of a corpse. This was, after all, the height of the pandemic in Florida; death was going door to door. And here I was, complaining of a fever. I had just turned 30. I was —- and still am, or so I like to think —- a young man. I could still walk my dog, grade papers, and post on Twitter. I’d lost some weight and wasn’t eating much, but I wasn’t incapacitated. These doctors concurred, gave me a once-over and moved me along. In hindsight, I could have demanded blood tests and better care, but deferring to doctors is what patients are supposed to do: Evan Grillon — survivor of cardiac surgery, former crisis centre counsellor — on illness, being a patient, and living with death.
  
  
  • I had only just turned 52 one week before the September evening I collapsed. But the year from 51 to 52 had been a remarkably bad one: To accompany Evan Grillon’s piece above, here is Tom Seneca, also a relatively young man, with his reflections on his own experience of illness.