My mom read Longing is Violet Dusk. She called me, concerned. She was worried that I might be feeling depressed or having regrets about past boyfriends. It made me laugh. I took it as a compliment to my writing. I am quite happily married and none of my past boyfriends evoke a stitch of longing in me.
One of the fun things about writing, is climbing into someone else’s head for a little bit and applying the emotions that I do feel to life situations that I don’t experience. Which is what I did with Hazel and Nina in LVD.
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
This poem, by AE Housman, really captures what it means to long for something. I love that first line: into my heart an air that kills. That’s exactly what longing feels like to me. There’s nothing like poetry to convey a poignant emotion. That feeling is what Hazel’s family and friends are grappling with in LVD.
When is the last time you felt the bittersweet pang of longing?
As a young teenager, I read a lot of classic romances. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Eyre and the Anne of Green Gables series were among my favorites. My young heart longed for the experience of romance. Not any particular boy, just the experience. My mom had a beautiful garden with a swing, and I remember reading outside until it got too dark to see the words. Then I would look up into the beauty of the sky at dusk with a painful swelling in my heart. It felt like melancholy excitement.
When I got older, I met THE boy, but he went overseas for a couple years after we started dating. I couldn’t talk to him very often and I missed him all the time. Sometimes at night I would cry myself to sleep, telling God that I would be perfectly happy for the rest of my life if I could just have him around to hold me when I cry.
As I’ve gotten older, my pangs of longing aren’t romantic anymore. They’re rooted in time. I feel an ache in my throat when I miss old friends and places I used to live. I’ll hear a few bars of an old song and sigh, longing for a simpler time in my life. Or the most poignant, I look at pictures of my kids from when they were younger and won’t be able to breathe because I miss their cute little selves so much.
I’ve also longed for success in various ways over the years. Longing is regret dialed down a notch and the precursor to setting goals. What would have happened if I had chosen a different career path? Would I have been able to achieve something if I had just worked a little harder? Maybe I’ll be able to accomplish that when I’m at a different stage in my life.
This feeling, of longing, is quintessentially and universally human and I loved playing with it as I wrote Hazel’s latest dilemma.
Hazel’s next book is centered around anger. I can’t wait to get the call from my mom after she reads that one…
