The Book of Longings

by Sue Monk Kidd

All my life, longings lived inside me, rising up like nocturnes to wail and sing through the night.

To be ignored, to be forgotten, this was the worst sadness of all. I swore an oath to set down their accomplishments and praise their flourishings, no matter how small. I would be a chronicler of lost stories.

“A man’s holy of holies contains God’s laws, but inside a woman’s there are only longings.” Then she tapped the flat bone over my heart and spoke the charge that caused something to flame up in my chest: “Write what’s inside here, inside your holy of holies.”

Our one true God dwelled inside the Holy of Holies in the Temple at Jerusalem, and I was sure it was impious to speak of a similar place existing inside humans, and worse still to suggest that yearnings inside girls like me had intimations of divinity. It was the most beautiful, wicked blasphemy I’d ever heard. I could not sleep that night for the ecstasy of it.

The act itself of writing evoked powers, often divine, but sometimes unstable, that entered the letters and sent a mysterious animating force rippling through the ink.

Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart. Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it. Bless my reed pens and my inks. Bless the words I write. May they be beautiful in your sight. May they be visible to eyes not yet born. When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.

“Think of it—the life you’re living can be torn apart like Osiris’s and a new one pieced together. Some part of you might die and a new self will rise up to take its place.”

I tell you, there are times when words are so glad to be set free they laugh out loud and prance across their tablets and inside their scrolls. So it was with the words I wrote. They reveled till dawn.

“Under penalty of death, you can go no further.” I stared at the smoke plumes rising from the altar beyond the gate. “But why can’t I go, too?” For years, whenever I recalled her answer, it would bestow on me the same jolt of surprise I’d felt the day she’d uttered it. “Because, Ana, you are female. This is the Court of Women. We can go no further.” In this manner I discovered that God had relegated my sex to the outskirts of practically everything.

she told me that I had traveled to a secret sky, the one beyond this one where the queen of heaven reigns, for Yahweh knew nothing of female matters of the heart.

Could we know the ways of God or not? Did he possess an intention for us, his people, as our religion believed, or was it up to us to invent meaning for ourselves? Perhaps nothing was as I’d thought.

Thunder cracked over our heads. Whenever the sky quaked, women uttered a blessing: Lord preserve me from the wrath of Lilith. But I could never bring myself to say it. I would whisper instead, Lord, bless the roaring, and that was what rose now to my lips.

A wave of fear passed through me. Our lives and fates left to men. This world, this God-forsaken world.

Most men knew nothing of the ways in which women avoided pregnancy. When it came to children, they didn’t much consider the agony of birth and the possibility of death; they thought instead of God’s mandate to be fruitful and multiply. It seemed to be a command God had devised with men in mind, and it was the only one they were universally good at obeying.

I think every pain in this world wants to be witnessed,

Pressing my fist against my mouth, I listened to a moan escape between my fingers, a quashed, eerie sound. Tighter, tighter, the pain bit down, and I saw how it would be, bearing a child. The fangs would chomp and let go, chomp and let go, and there would be nothing to do but give myself to the slow devouring.

Let life be life. There was a quiet relinquishment in the words.

“Life will be life and death will be death,” I whispered, and with those words, grief filled the empty place in me where the baby had lain. I would carry it there like a secret all the days of my life.

I was the shattered pieces on the floor. Life had taken a mallet to me.

We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies. They are ours to relinquish when we choose.

He picked up the shard on which I’d been writing. There in Greek, in tiny brokenhearted letters: I loved her with all my heart, and with all my soul, and with all my might. “You write of our daughter,” he said, and his voice broke.

How awake we were, how alive. I pressed my ear to his chest and listened to the slow drumming. I thought us inseparable. A single timbre.

I was glad for it. It drove away my hurt. “It’s thought we’re too weak to face danger and hardship. But do we not give birth? Do we not work day and night? Are we not ordered about and silenced? What are robbers and rainstorms compared to these things?”

There was an incongruous peace in my helplessness, in the knowledge that what was done was done and could not be undone, and even if I could change it, I wouldn’t.

“To avoid a fear emboldens it,”

When I tell you all shall be well, I don’t mean that life won’t bring you tragedy. Life will be life. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. All shall be well, no matter what.”

“We will teach you about our God and you will teach us about yours, and together we’ll find the God that exists behind them.”

“What most sets you apart is the spirit in you that rebels and persists. It isn’t the largeness in you that matters most, it’s your passion to bring it forth.”

Were we women the only ones with hearts large enough to hold such anguish?

Don’t look away. Terrible things will happen now. Unbearable things. Bear it anyway.

“I don’t mean that life won’t bring you tragedy. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. There’s a place in you that is inviolate. You’ll find your way there, when you need to. And you’ll know then what I speak of.”

In all that time, the pain of his absence had not diminished. The familiar burning came to my eyes, followed by that sense I often got of wandering inside my heart, desperately searching for what I could never find—my husband. I feared my grief would turn to despair, that it would become a skin I couldn’t shed. A great tiredness came over me then. I closed my eyes, wanting the dark, empty void.

“WHEN I AM DUST, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.”