longing

Oh honey, someday a real man is going to make you see stars and you won't even be looking at the sky." Excerpt from Grace Willow's Last Minute Bride

Be careful what you wish for. It may turn out that making the wish was the only good part.

If only you would kiss me.Press your lips to mine like a searing iron. Wrap me in your arms as if you were a monarch claiming a kingdom. Hold me close until I warm through to the core. Do this, and I promise to melt into you, no longer a cold and frozen figure in your narrowed sight. How devoted I would be if only your lips burned for mine!If only you would kiss me.

She is the ocean, gentle, smooth and calm on the surface_I am the fooling diver, braving her deep, dark, dangerous depth_

She was a ray of sunshine, a warm summer rain, a bright fire on a cold winter__ day, and now she could be dead because she had tried to save the man she loved.

It had been dark at the beach for hours, he hadn't been smoking much and it wasn't headlights _ but before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after sunset that catches a face turned to the west, watching the ocean for someone to come in on the last wave of the day, in to shore and safety.

Taggle, meanwhile, made himself popular, killing rats and bringing a rabbit into camp every evening, preening in the praise - silently, thank god, though at night, he recounted choice bits to Kate: "Rye Baro says I am a princeling; he split the leg bone for me so that I could eat the marrow. They love me. And I'm sure they'll keep you, too."Mira, she thought, and treasured it each time she heard it, They must keep me. Family.

Plain Kate greased her boots and bandaged her feet, and soon she would walk like a Roamer born. She helped Drina with the water and the wood, and in the long, wet evenings she carved objarka burji.Plain Kate carved fast and learned slowly. She was bewildered most of the time, but Daj called her mira again, and when she asked Drina what it meant, the girl replied, "It means she likes you. It means your family."Family. It could have kept her walking for a hundred miles. And she did walk far.

The days passed in a dream. I pictured our reunion again and again, played it out in my mind over and over until I__ 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__ finest expression. In hope__ loss, however, is the greatest despair.

I wish I had heard him more clearly: an oblique confession is always a plea.

What the dead had no speech for, when living,They can tell you, being dead: the communicationOf the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

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

In all my wanderings through this world of care,In all my griefs -- and God has given my share --I still had hopes, my latest hours to crown,Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down;To husband out life's taper at the close,And keep the flame from wasting, by repose:I still had hopes, for pride attends us still,Amidst the swains to show my book-learn'd skill,Around my fire an evening group to draw,And tell of all I felt, and all I saw;And, as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,Pants to the place from whence at first she flew,I still had hopes, my long vexations past,Here to return -- and die at home at last.

Fair as the moon and joyful as the light;Tot wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;Not as she is, but as she fills his dreams.

I mean, by such flightiness, something that feels unsatisfied at the center of my life _ that makes me shaky, fickle, inquisitive, and hungry. I could call it a longing for home and not be far wrong. Or I could call it a longing for whatever supersedes, if it cannot pass through, understanding. Other words that come to mind: faith, grace, rest. In my outward appearance and life habits I hardly change _ there__ never been a day that my friends haven__ been able to say, and at a distance, __here__ Oliver, still standing around in the weeds. There she is, still scribbling in her notebook._ But, at the center: I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel. Restless. I read about ideas. Yet I let them remain ideas. I read about the poet who threw his books away, the better to come to a spiritual completion. Yet I keep my books. I flutter; I am attentive, maybe I even rise a little, balancing; then I fall back.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, the longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home.

Being inside this cottage, with dark wooden walls and hand-carved furniture like my own home, cast a darkened stain onto my heart.

Nostalgia is a longing for your home.