Make It Scream, Make It Burn

by Leslie Jamison

The swell of potential worked on me like a drug, blocking out everything else: the pelting sleet, the black ice, the road slipping under my tires.

You just had to keep falling in love, over and over again, and hope that it stuck once, to prove it could.

and when I was around him there was a lump in my throat that I couldn’t stop swallowing, a longing not for the man in front of me, but for the man who wasn’t.

One definition of living might be the perpetual swapping of story lines. We trade in the scripts we’ve written for ourselves and get our real lives in return.

For years I’d been an expert at longing, an expert at loving from the state of not-quite-having, an expert at daydreaming and sinking back into the plush furniture of cinematic imagining.

Marriage isn’t months of fantasy. It’s years of cleaning out the fridge. For a long time, I had admired the art of showing up—in my friends, my mother, my brother, the other folks in recovery meetings—but it’s one thing to admire how other people live, and another thing to try to live that way yourself: not waiting for love to stick, as if love itself could do the work, but waking up to support it each day—knowing it can’t promise to be anything forever, except something that is always changing.

It’s everything you keep trying to summon faith in, and it delivers you to what you couldn’t have imagined: past that first flush of falling in love, to all the other kinds of love that lie ahead. You may never reach Lake Mead, but you’ll always have the drive itself—that particular glow of evening sun baking the highway, setting the cars on fire, light brighter than you can stand to look at, and already holding the night.

The Uses of Enchantment,

It can be a fine line between stories that give our fears a necessary stage and stories that deepen them—that make us more afraid.

Finding darkness in another story is so much less lonely than fearing the darkness is yours alone.

This is heartbreak: rupture is huge in your heart, while the rest of the world is checking on scattered showers.

Every time I thought he was over, that I’d traveled through him, it turned out he wasn’t over yet. I could go as many miles as I wanted and there would still be more of how it felt to lose him.

Nostalgia rearranges the rooms of memory: it makes the beds, puts a vase of flowers on the dresser, opens the curtains to let in the sun.

I want some reminder of a self that felt volcanic and volatile—bursting into bliss, or into tears—and because I want to keep some proof of all the unlived lives, the ones that could have been.

Yearning for things was slightly less embarrassing if I denied myself access to them, so I grew comfortable in states of longing without satisfaction. I came to prefer hunger to eating, epic yearning to daily loving.