"...The place that opened felt more like a hunger,
a bottomless, general desire, a perpetual state of anticipation,
as if there were this person who was always almost in sight, slipping around the
next corner, disappearing down subway stairs,
going the other way through the next turnstile. The kind of unobjectified longing
that made her react to a pathos in even the
stupidest top-forty love songs and search the faces of passersby in a way you
shouldn't do in the city.
"Yet this place that had opened could also heal over. It had been long enough
now that the desire that had been so great
was shrunk to a small, inward sadness..."
- excerpt from Ellen Lesser's "For Solo Piano",
found in her short story anthology The Shoplifter's Apprentice
(ISBN 0-671-69318-2, Washington Square Press, 1990).
