When I was a very young woman, I was enthralled by two promises, neither of which involved me. I heard the first at the wedding of a friend. She and her husband-to-be had written their own vows and they read them to each other at the ceremony. The groom led with this indelible sentence: If you wake in the darkness of your soul, I promise to hold you until light.
I read the second in a personal ad at the back of a gay men’s s/m magazine: I’ll have you praying for dawn.
These vows would seem antithetical to each other. One offers comfort, the other torment. But I was in my early twenties, an age when both of these seemed essential to romantic happiness. Moreover, both recognize night as the crucible in which our most harrowing hours unfold. Both are night promises.
***
The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light;” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.
According to our creation story, night came first: darkness upon the deep. Put another way, night is older than day; night is older than time; night is the womb from which the world emerged.
***
Driving home is nothing like driving away, and night is nothing like the day. Life is different at night; we are different. Night tends to strip us of our titles, our worldly roles, our formal clothing and our credentials. Most of us retreat into our private lives and often we seek out secret forms of gratification. Our fear is sharpened, our loneliness honed. Fevers run higher at night and chronic pain tends to worsen.
Henry Miller wrote: Night is longing, longing, longing, beyond all endurance.
Mark Twain said: In my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race – never quite sane in the night.
I’m grateful to know I’m in good company.
***
My early twenties – the era of the two promises – also marked the start of my stint as a stripper. During my first month at a club I’ll call The Catwalk, I worked an afternoon shift that drew most of its customers at lunchtime, when they could avail themselves of a limited buffet (hot wings, spare ribs, rice) along with the view. The men would come in, fill their paper plates, and sit politely around the periphery of the stage. Most of them brought a thin sheaf of singles for the purpose of tipping the dancers, and these were yielded up one at a time until they were gone.
No one ever seemed to get too hot and bothered. Rather, the prevailing attitude was affable, companionable. As in: you’re working; we’re working; nice to see you.
Within a few weeks, I traded this early shift for the very late one – the one from 8:00 in the evening until 4:00 in the morning — and never looked back. The night shift was different from its daytime counterpart in every way. For one thing, there was real money to be made. By the time I walked in at 7:30 p.m., the walls of the place were pulsing with raucousness, testosterone and heat.
Because strip joints fill up at night. Lounges and clubs and bars fill up at night. They fill with people who come in and cast off their everyday, workaday selves like kicking off a pair of sensible shoes. They let their yearning rise to the surface. They’re raring to go for broke. They confess and plead and posture and preen and empty their wallets and don’t know when to stop. They come as their night selves.
***
I’ve had a night self, a secret self, for as long as I can remember. Even as a very young child, I liked to go to bed because it was my chance to lie in the dark and bask in my fantasies. The scenes I conjured were usually drawn from stories I’d heard, but I cast myself as the victim in each one. I wanted to be held captive like Beauty, imprisoned like Rapunzel, caged like Gretel, enslaved like Cinderella: so many stories began in torment and ended in comfort that it would seem as if torment led, inevitably, inexorably, to comfort. Suffering was nearly always the lot of beautiful female characters – right up until the last moment, and very few words were ever spent on the redemptive endings. And they lived happily ever after failed to engage my imagination.
***
I’m thirteen years old and babysitting for the Kaplan family. It’s around ten at night and both kids have long been in bed. I’ve already rummaged through their parents’ medicine cabinets and dresser drawers, and now at the bottom of Mr. Kaplan’s clothes closet, I find a stash of magazines with titles like Penthouse and Hustler.
For the next few hours, I lie on the floor and look at these. With a shiver of something like recognition, I come upon an image of a woman on her knees, wrists tied above her head. Then another with a studded collar and her hands cuffed behind her. Still later, a model bound by the wrists and ankles to the four posters of a bed.
These pictures are a revelation, the very first time I understand that it isn’t just me.
A second revelation: that the soft-spoken and unassuming Mr. Kaplan — a member of the P.T.A. and the coach of his son’s Little League – has a night self too.
***
I’m fourteen and my favorite album is The Stranger by Billy Joel. I listen to the title track every night:
Well, we all have a face
That we hide away forever
And we take them out and show ourselves
When everyone has gone;
Some are satin, some are steel,
Some are silk and some are leather:
They’re the faces of the stranger
But we love to try them on.
***
I’m sixteen and my nascent sex life has not progressed beyond heavy petting. I’ve never shared my true desires with any of my high school boyfriends. Tonight I’m alone in the kitchen with the Yellow Pages, calling a recruiter for the U.S. Marines.
(So much about this story seems unlikely to me now: I managed to reach him late at night? He was willing to have an extended conversation with me? And over the phone, sight unseen? But this is what I remember.)
“Sir?” I say in response to the self-identified sergeant on the line. (It’s possible I’ve contrived the whole venture just for the chance to call a man sir.) “I’m thinking of joining the Marines when I finish high school.”
“When do you graduate?” he wants to know. His voice is resonant and self-possessed.
“In May,” I tell him. “But I have a couple of questions.”
“Well, fire away.”
“Okay, first – would I have to cut my hair? It’s very long.”
“Is your hair your security blanket?” he asks.
And I feel a quickening within me. Yes, this is what I envisioned when I opened the phone book. Someone – a man, not a boy — who would take my measure and call me out.
“You know, that’s an interesting question,” I tell him. “I never thought about it that way.”
“You’ll learn a lot about yourself in the Marines,” he tells me. “Things you never knew. You’ll find out what you’re made of. Does that scare you?”
“Yes,” I say. It’s the first true thing I’ve said.
“Are you willing to let someone break you down in order to build you back up?”
“I guess that’s what I need to figure out.”
“It’s not for everyone,” he says.
***
I’m a senior in college, living in an apartment off campus. There is no internet yet, and I go to copy shops to fax the text of my personal ads to The New York Press. Women get to publish their ads for free and the paper makes money when men pay to leave voicemail for them. Messages are accessed by a code punched into a touch-tone phone.
Here is one of the ads I run during this time:
HOUSEGIRL POSITION SOUGHT: Vagabond wants to come home. SWF, wandering Jewess, charming waif, love slave will cook, clean and entertain master of the house for room and board. I’ll be your muse, masseuse, and charlotte russe. Take me in? Serious replies only.
At night, after my schoolwork is done, I listen to my messages and call the most promising men. The first one ever to respond is in his early forties. He’s a priest and the headmaster of one of the most prestigious Catholic schools in Manhattan (a man with whom I will remain lifelong friends). It is less and less a surprise to me that such people also have night selves.
I don’t have sex with these men, and I meet very few of them. But I talk to them, and the talk is a potent fix. Every conversation is an interview of sorts. The men have their own ideas of what the proposed arrangement would look like and the fun is in hearing the details they’ve dreamed up.
One man informs me that I wouldn’t be allowed to touch myself without his permission. He speaks slowly to underscore the seriousness of this point. “Every… orgasm… you ever… have again… will be at my discretion,” he says.
Another tells me that I’d never be allowed to say the word “no” in his presence. He doesn’t mean just that I could not refuse an order, or withhold anything from him. He means that I also couldn’t say No kidding, or There’s no ice cream left in the freezer.
“Sir, may I ask a question?”
“You may.”
“If I’m not… denying you anything, or defying you in some way, then what is the point of this rule?”
“Besides forcing you to think before you speak, every time you speak to me,” he says, “the point is what it will do for your head to get rid of that word.”
Night splinters our resistance. In the lyrics of Jackson Browne: You’re gonna want me tonight/ when you’re ready to surrender./ Forget about who’s right/ when you’re ready to remember./ It’s another world at night/ and you’re ready to be tender.
Once in a while, when the messages in my box are uniformly unsatisfying, I call my ex-boyfriend, whom I left several months ago. I don’t want to get back together with him, or even to have sex with him. I want him — I beg him — to come over and beat me with his belt.
***
After college, I get a job as a phone sex operator, another position with shifts around the clock. But as with stripping, the work is very different depending upon when I’m there.
Of course there are exceptions, but in general — at least in my experience — a day shift isn’t very demanding. I often get a kick out of watching my co-workers take the intermittent calls. Oh sugar, baby, give it to me, yeah, that’s it, just like that, ooooh, oh God, oh yeah, I love it, right there, ahhhh, they will say while leafing through a magazine or filing their nails. One afternoon when the place is unexpectedly short-staffed, I’m working alone during lunch hour and two phones ring at the same time. After a moment of panic, I pick up a receiver with each hand.
“Honey?” I drawl into both phones at once. I have one at my right ear, the other at my left.
“Yeah?” the two say in unison.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe you called, I’ve been lying here thinking about you all day,” I tell them. “I was just waiting for you to walk in and undress me. Would you please come here and take off my g-string?”
“Hell yes, I will,” the first man says, just as the other one answers, “Here I come, baby.”
It goes on like this, surreally, two nearly-identical conversations happening in stereo: both men glad to let me lead, neither aware that I’m on two calls at once, and – most incredibly – both of them achieving release at the same moment. As I simultaneously replace the two phones in their cradles, I think: If this were a scene in a movie, I’d hurl a shoe at the screen.
By contrast, most night conversations can’t be conducted with a standard script. The late-night callers are exquisitely specific. One wants to watch me suck my boyfriend’s big black dick, and then he wants me to taunt him about the pathetic dimensions of his own member. One wants me to dress him up in my clothes and I have to describe every thread of the ensemble, from the ruby-hued shoes to the black lace panties to the red satin teddy. One wants me to be his little sister: to crawl into his bed, clinging to him and crying after a bad dream.
At night, I have to pay attention, summon compassion, go deeper.
To illustrate the day/night dichotomy another way: the average caller is like a young man with a poster of Pamela Anderson on his wall. Sure, he finds Pam hot, and yeah, he’d do her in a second, but what truly, deeply stirs him beyond expression is the idea of a female quadruple amputee. He’s not going to talk about this with his friends, or display a picture of a limbless woman. But that’s his innermost vision of bliss.
By day, for the most part, the callers were happy to get it on with Pamela Anderson. But in the deep of night, they needed their secret and unseemly ecstasies.
***
A few months later, I secure a volunteer position on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where I’m a housemother in a boarding school. I supervise the kids’ afterschool activities, help them with their homework, play games with them before bedtime, and listen to their life stories.
Once they’re asleep, my time is my own until the following afternoon. But here, there is no way for my night self to seek gratification from any external source. There is still no internet and I have no phone. There are no nightclubs or bars on the reservation; there’s not even a café or movie house or bookstore. The social center of the town is the gas station, with its tiny convenience store; inside are two or three tables next to a few arcade games.
Here I can’t act out my fantasies, or talk them out, or even find facets of them in fiction or film. The only way to bring them into being is to write them. One s/m-themed story after another emerges, enough to yield my first book.
***
At the end of the school year, I go back to New York City and start making up for lost time. I follow a friend into the stripping business, where I don’t intend to stay for more than a few weeks. In order to lease a studio apartment in Manhattan, you need the first and last months’ rent as well as a security deposit and broker’s fee. The plan is to make enough to land a place of my own, and then find a regular daytime job.
But the strip joint is a place I can be paid to stay up all night. A place where I can dance nearly naked in a cage, for fully-clothed men who come and talk to me through the bars. I’m there to serve, and the stage is an auction block, and the highest bidder can keep me for the length of a song or bring me into the back room for an hour or two or four. (The back room is $300 an hour, but all it really buys is privacy. The men talk to me back there; they tell me the fantasies they’ve never told their wives.) I end up staying for the better part of four years.
***
My night life isn’t limited to the strip joint. I go to s/m clubs like Hellfire and The Vault. I tour houses of domination like The Nutcracker Suite and Pandora’s Box. I attend fetish events and “play parties” and leather contests. I watch people being whipped, fucked, fisted, pissed on, branded, burned with cigarettes, covered with dripping wax, shocked with cattle prods.
In the midst of all this, a rarefied dream persists: of a dominant man who is serious, deliberate, devoted to form, gentlemanly in his way; a man who will initiate me into his service and own me forever. This man will always be a stranger to me, because in spite of our ongoing liaison, there will always be so much built-in distance (not to mention inequity) in our relationship that it could never truly be intimate. He will train and enslave me, summon and dismiss me at will.
This dream is unoriginal; it’s at the heart of just about every s/m novel on my shelf.
My nights in the New York City netherworld show me that I’m a lightweight. I’m often unsettled by the extremity of the s/m scenes unfolding before me, though I always feel privileged to witness them. I’m fascinated by how far people are willing to go, how far they need to go. By turns I’m mesmerized and transported and shocked and vexed, dazed and aroused and uplifted and troubled, breathless and desolate and stunned and moved. But I never come near to finding what I want.
It takes me years to understand what now seems as self-evident as the night is long: that a fantasy is exactly that.
***
Today, I’m married with children and people often ask me whether s/m is still a part of my life. Whether it has a place in my relationship with my husband. As if I might have cast it away, or fled from it. It’s hard to know how to answer.
In the early days of our marriage, my husband was still a relative stranger to me. On our wedding day, we’d barely been together eleven months. Nikolai grew up in Russia, came to the U.S. alone at the age of seventeen, and didn’t see his family again for eleven years. In this way, he was essentially an orphan: alone in New York City with no money, no contacts, no English, no nothing. He almost starved during his first year. Once he went a full week without a mouthful of food.
By the time I met him — at a start-up I.T. venture where I was the copywriter, he the head engineer — he was solvent and secure. He disliked talking about his early struggles in America and could rarely be persuaded to do so. He didn’t like to talk about Russia either. We were engaged and then married and still I hadn’t met his parents or brother.
When other Russians addressed him in their native language, he would answer coldly in English. He collected night vision paraphernalia and Kevlar vests. Special agents were always showing up at the office for a word with him. In so many ways, he was a mystery to me, and this was a considerable part of his charm.
During our courtship and a few months into our marriage, we brought many elements of s/m into our sex life: bondage, spanking, play-acting that went on for hours.
But when I became pregnant, I didn’t want to play this way for the duration. And once our daughter arrived, sex of any stripe was relegated to rare and uninspired interludes between the never-ending demands of a newborn. Night was no longer about adventure or escape, but a bleary-eyed expanse continually broken by nursing an infant. My body was given over to its most utilitarian purpose, my mind to maternal concerns.
A little later, with a child and then two children sleeping across the hall, I found I couldn’t lose myself in s/m scenes anymore, even with the door locked. Besides, by that time, my husband was too familiar to me.
The night self relies on the torment of strangers.
What I want from my husband now seems to be comfort, unadulterated.
***
I often think of these lines by Alice Munro: I come back again and again to the center of my fantasy, to the moment when you give yourself up, give yourself over, to the assault which is guaranteed to finish off everything you’ve been before. A stubborn virgin’s belief, this belief in perfect mastery; any broken-down wife could tell you there is no such thing.
***
In the dailiness of long-term intimacy, where does the night self go? Not long ago, out alone for lunch, I sat near a man and woman who were clearly married but not to each other. When she said, “I can’t do this anymore,” I thought I knew the conversation they were about to have. I was mistaken.
“We’re not doing anything,” the man said.
“Well, exactly. And it’s too hard to be around you for that reason.”
“Listen, we’ve talked about this. If I didn’t have kids, it’d be different,” he told her. “But I grew up watching my father cheat on my mom and I’m not doing that to my sons.”
“If you really wanted me, nothing would stop you.”
“You know I want you,” he said. “Who wouldn’t want you? But it’s not going to happen.”
“Well, I need to not see you anymore.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said, irritated. “Cut it out, would you?”
“You don’t get it,” she told him. “I’m obsessed. I lie in bed next to my husband and all I can think about is you. Every single night.”
“Well, don’t think about me every single night,” he said, as if it were an obvious solution, and just that easy. “Look, the situation is what it is, but we have a connection. A real one, a rare one. Why does it have to be all or nothing?”
What startled me as I sat there, staring into my soup and listening with all my might, was that I felt closer to the man’s pragmatic stance than to the woman’s impassioned one. Come on, I tried to chide her by way of telepathy. Isn’t it enough to know that the feelings are there, that they’re reciprocal? A relationship of mutual restraint, friendship with a frisson of desire: how delicious that is and how nourishing; can’t you just let it be there?
If I’m not at the mercy of my own night self anymore, it’s not because I’ve outgrown or disowned it. Nor do I regret the bittersweet mystery of its long tenure in my life. But somehow, it’s become possible to just let it be there, or – as on the reservation — to harness it in service of something else. It’s become enough to feel a warmth, a twinge, a wistful pang; for me, now, there is pleasure in these things and less goes a longer way.
Even the man who wrote The Stranger told us later, in another song, sometimes a fantasy is all you need.
***
Lately our five-year-old daughter has been coming into our bed in the middle of the night. Usually she’s whimpering as she runs into our room. From a dream? Fear of the dark? Or just loneliness? She’s never been able or willing to say.
I’ve heard a lot of advice against letting her sleep with us. “Once they’re in your bed, you will never, ever get them out,” a friend with young twins has warned. And my own mother often tells me, “I never allowed you in my bed. Not once.”
Still, my tendency is to let her stay. What never fails to move me is how swiftly she drops back into sleep once she’s nestled against me. My chance to offer her perfect comfort will be all too fleeting; I can’t imagine relinquishing, ahead of time, what will so briefly be mine.
If you wake in the darkness of your soul, I try to tell her without words, I promise to hold you until light. For as long as you’ll let me. May you never have to pray for dawn.
64 responses
I do all my composing at night, not just because it is quiet, but because it is honest. I find that I find more self-sincerity than in the day-time. We wear masks in the daytime, what I like to call “stage face,” and many times the person we know during the day can be very different than the person we see at night.
This article says the one thing that many have not acknowledged yet feel is true. We are our true self at night, I think. We take of the masks and we are left only with our “self.” Sometimes the “self” is far scarier or more beautiful than we think.
“If you wake in the darkness of your soul, I promise to hold you until light.” – I like that.
A terrific read. Thank you.
I had to take a moment after the last bit to realize there was nothing more, that this was the end. Your honesty, your passion, your truthfulness…these come out in every word. You pulled away the mask of darkness and exposed not only a part of yourself but a part of society so well hidden. You’ve explored dark corners that most of us are afraid to face, in ourselves and in others.
I am constantly amazed in my professional life at the masks people wear. You can hear it in the saccarin sweetness of their voices. I often wonder how many of them go home to a life that is nothing at all like what they show at work? You explored that world, and your writing brings allows us to dip our toes through your own experience. Safely we read and know what it might be like to sit inside that cage and look out at the dark hidden desires of others.
With each section, I can feel nervous, excited, embarrassed, and most of all I want to hear more. Reading, I feel a bit like you when you sat at the table listening to the illicit lovers talking; I’m eager, I’m enthralled, and I find myself relating to one side or another and wishing I could somehow let you know my thoughts in that situation.
I also felt a little bitter-sweet sadness at your conclusion…yet your life isn’t over and your life will continue to change. I hope we’ll hear more from you as it does. I know I will always be there to read it.
Z.
Paradoxically, what I like so much about this essay is the fact that I can relate to it so little, and yet it opens up a vista that I deeply wish I understood. After reading this, I wish so much that I had a night self. Maybe I do, and reading this will inspire me to try harder to find it. But still, for me, the power of this essay is that it allows me to see something I don’t naturally understand. It’s easy to read about something I already “get,” and to “get” it. But I appreciate being clearly shown something I don’t “get,” with language and perspective that allow me to stand for a moment where the writer is standing, and see an unfamiliar view.
not just a terrific read! but a walk down memory lane. it leads me to the admittance of that desire that ruled the nights of my life…makes me wonder where they have gone. Older now and supposedly more sure of what i want? read this and take grip of that desire as it was your own. I especially enjoy the small sampling of sexual fantasies thru her life, being able to recognize the security of night and allowing that person to surface and be real, at least until light. I look forward to reading more.
What an extraordinary essay — brutally honest and mesmerizing and painful and true. And what a pleasure to see a new piece of writing from Elissa Wald, whose two books I read and loved years ago but who hasn’t been heard from in years. More, please.
I am a lover of the day and the expectation of what a new day holds after my soul is returned to me.
Your story, forwarded to me by a friend, gave me a glimpse into the places your soul sojourned in the night with the expectations of what a night may hold. Very well written!
Ah, the ring of truth, so seldom heard!
This is by far one of the most powerful and succinct essays that I’ve read in years that details ones most intimate feelings. I will definitely pass this one on.
Elissa, you magnificent creature. This is some motherfucking writing. Thank you.
Elissa demonstrates a trait not often seen in erotica, simple honesty.
The best part of this particular vow, is the vow to write honestly that you always seem to keep.
Fantastic piece. I can’t relate at all, usually being the person who would prefer not to hear about, much less acknowledge people’s secret fantasties or fetishes. But that’s got to do more with me and the things I’ve been through than them.
For me, I’ve noticed I write better at night. And when I’m writing, I often cry. I think of Joan Didion, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, of how at 4 in the morning, we’re stripped bare. We’re the demons inside ourselves at this hour. We’re the unlived lives, the undreamed dreams, and all the things we ignore during the day.
Thanks for this piece.
Wow. This is the best thing I’ve read in years.
Great essay! Loved the writing.
You left me feeling exposed, open to the world, breathless, scared, and comforted. You writing always hits a nerve, as people we are always evolving, changing, in order to meet our own basic needs. But, put a child into the mix and life spins off on a tangent. The last line left me empty, by daughter is 16 and never will she need the comfort I provided to her as a young child. That hurt the most. BAC.
Elissa,
Thank you for a striking piece. I was hooked from the first line.
The deafening quiet of the night forces us to question our true selves, answer the pulsing questions that daytime distractions keep at bay. No wonder we feel vulnerable.
I’m learning to like the night. I read somewhere that we can also think of the onset of darkness as the earth rising. The sun blazes on, never really setting.
Conor
Elissa, often writers believe they are achieving honesty, when really they are managing narrative, cultivating it in carefully fertilized greenhouses, being careful not to reveal too much, to go too far, to find themselves exposed. So it is with people in their own lives, as you show us– need pulsing beneath the mask, bared in darkness– and so too there is a way that fantasy is both fundamental to us and finally not as substantial as that other kind of love that spans the dark and bears us through it.
I don’t know that I’ve read many essays willing to give away so fully and purely. I was moved to tears at the end, and I will never think of longing or of fantasy (or love) the same way again.
Raw and honest. Your writing took me to places I would have never gone otherwise. Beautiful read.
I loved this essay, Elissa. It swallowed me up in the best possible way. I’m a night person too and have always been enthralled by what it holds. I am grateful to have read this. Thanks for writing it.
A fascinating, thought-provoking piece; I hope to see more from this author.
This is fabulous and really thought-inspiring. Thank you for writing it. The end is particularly moving.
A gripping essay from start to finish. I have long thought about the different modes of being that come with day and night, as well as the endless dichotomy of our lighter and darker desires. Few writers pierce through the veneer, into with this sort of honesty, immodesty and depth. What a fucking treat!
This was just – enthralling –
One of the best essays I have read in a long time. My night has always been more of a dusk…
Beautifully written … Thank you …
Ah! How divinely delectable to read Elissa Wald! And now I’m thinking of the history of my own night self. Splendid essay on the beauty and mystery of the dark side, where our fantasies burn brightest. Thank you, Elissa, and please give us more!
wow! fantastic piece.
As a long time fan of Elissa Wald’s writing, I was thrilled to find this piece. It’s wonderful to read something so insightful, honest and quietly profound. This essay, while so specific to the writer’s individual life stories, embraces everyone who has lived a separate life at night, whether in reality or their own mind. As a woman, it put me back in touch with the “night” self I left behind. As a mother, I have found a night time role as well. I just didn’t have the words to so eloquently describe how nights (and myself) have changed, until now. A brilliant read. Thank you.
This is fantastic. Thank-you.
for me, this beautifully crafted piece explores multiple facets of our journey with intimacy: within ourselves and thru our sexual relationships…this piece has provoked me to contemplate my inner journey into the “dark night of the soul” and look at the facets within my own self that are hidden/dark/Night to my outer ego/personality self…
This is beautiful, Elissa. Thank you.
I love this idea of a night self, the way Wald weaves this idea throughout, and gives us glimpses of others in their night selves.
Lovely.
When I think of night shifts I am also a different person. Only my night shifts usually involve counter terror arrests, dark coffee like mud with my brothers. 98% routine and 2% adrenaline rush. Really interesting read.
Gorgeous essay, Elissa. Really inspired. I’ve always been a night person too–it runs in my family–and I was also (briefly) a phone sex operator. You describe it perfectly.
Comment? What can be said? Your work is beautifully crafted and evocative, as it always is. Nice coming out! Now we know where you’ve been hiding. There must be more to come?
In to the darkness…I much enjoyed, thank you Elissa. I’ve never gave the difference of night and day any thought before… original. Your timeline was perfectly done too. Impressive.
Very enjoyable,as someone who has worked the night shift in various service industries, the almost absurd contrast between the personality types of “day” and “night” customers, was very well illustrated.
this is beautiful. i especially love how you wrote about motherhood affecting your night self. gorgeous & moving.
There’s so much good here. I especially love the way humor finds a place in between the torment and the comfort, the night self/day self. And yet there aren’t any caricatures that made me stop reading, as in most every other bdsm narrative I completely stop reading mid-way through.
I find it ironic that the act of sharing this writing will bring comfort to others, as the writer has found comfort in her life. Thanks for sharing! You make me want to become a braver writer.
I never comment on anything but I felt compelled to on this piece. It’s so rare that a piece of writing can really cause a giant, reverberating contemplative silence. Maybe it’s something about writing about sex and desire in an honest way. Whatever it was I was so extremely moved by this. Thank you so much.
WOW. I’ve read this four times, and each time I re-read, I find new ways to be moved — like what happens I listen to my favorite music. Elissa’s beauty-drenched words give us that rare satisfaction that comes from great art: The sense of being taken somewhere farther and wilder than you’ve ever been and coming back changed. Elissa’s velvety warm voice reminds me of this line by Wallace Stevens: “The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.”
I was asked to read this and share my thoughts about the writers style and content. I had a preconceived notion of what I thought it would entail. I was a bit hesitant at first to travel down this subject, but if you take the time to absorb the the message that your don’t read but understand. You will be blown away by the eloquence of this Authors writing. True a great read and I will look forward to reading more of her word. Well done!
Elissa – I loved this essay. There’s something terribly sad about accepting the loss of a childhood love but like most of the other people who commented, I am wildly impressed with your honesty. I wonder, though… Life doesn’t begin or end with children, sharing your body, your brain and your bed with them is just a step along the way. I hope you write the sequel to this in 15 years.
Wow. Rarely do I stumble upon an exquisite piece of writing that speaks to me so directly. The vivid scenes expertly conjure past longings and the questions raised are those I’ve also asked myself in secret, at night. What a gift to read a work that so bravely and eloquently speaks to what many are too ashamed to voice. I look forward to reading more of Ms. Wald’s work.
Elissa, having read your two books and loved then, then not having anything new of yours to read for a long span of time, I was delighted to find your essay, Night Shift. It is a joy to read such wonderful prose. I pride myself on my own honesty, but it is such a rare quality in people, and you have it at an almost supernatural level. I practically inhaled your words. As a physician, most of my reading is of a professional nature (journals, reports, consultations) and in my constant quest to save time, I confess I usually rush to get to the bottom line of just about any document I read, even literary ones. But I savored yours, easily embracing the emotions and imagery of your words You have very special gifts and talent, far greater than those possessed by some of the most celebrated writers, and your maturity and life experience seem to have given your words even more character and depth as you continue to grow.
Elissa Wald’s writing with an entwined quote from Alice Munroe.
Let the night come and the light follow…
Thank you.
Elissa is the most honest writer. The clearest writer. Her writing always cuts right through me…sometimes I have to remind myself to breathe when I read it. Night Shifts is one of those pieces that just forces you to take inventory of what you have and what you don’t have. And in the end the reader feels less isolated knowing that she exists, that her writing exists.
Wow. Thanks for writing such a lovely piece and meditation on your/our fierce and fragile sexual alphabet of the night.
What a candidly written, thought provoking piece of work. Thank you Elissa, for stirring thoughts in me that have long since quieted themselves over my 45 years of maturity. As a mother of young children as well, my heart stirred with the count of your 5 year old coming to your bed at night seeking the devoted reassurance of your arms. Aren’t children are such a precious part of who we are as well as themselves? If your nurturing, maternal instincts are to hold your child until the light, then my dear, it is my belief that holding and thereby comforting that child is the most perfect act of love you can give. As for who we become at night, I agree that we find ourselves authenticated in our own skin. I agree we should relish the ability to feel and experience that part of ourselves. In those beliefs, I still innately require that time with myself. I shoo my husband off to bed after tucking our beloved children in and even here in our own lovely abode, begin finding myself disrobed of my many diurnal states and at the mercy of my own night self. Your essay so eloquently reveals what a gifted writer you are I am genuinely enthralled with how much I can relate to your thesis. I will make it a point Ms Wald, to unearth your previous compositions and narratives as well as await with pleasure your future writings.
What gorgeous writing! This is such a tender, honest, and perfect description of the need and quest for perfect comfort. For years, I have accepted and enjoyed the necessary path of torment leading to it as part of the journey, while wondering if there are other kinds of satisfaction possible. THANK you!
Tell it! Thank you! WLAMF, and with tenderness.
I’m reminded of this piece of a William Blake poem:
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
(For some of us, myself included, endless night and sweet delight are, in fact, more intrinsically intertwined than not). Elissa Wald’s writing resonates powerfully with my deep and secret places. She speaks the unspoken, unfalteringly coaxing the hidden into the light.
As someone who shares the same s/m tendencies, your story spoke to me. I, too, can recall being a young girl and fantasizing about being kidnapped, or held prisoner. One such instance in particular, I imagined myself manacled, in a spread-eagle position. I was around 5-6 years old, and my dad walked by my open bedroom door and saw me.
I remember finding out about the existence of the kink community, and my first taste of pain as pleasure and how it all twisted together to finally give me understanding. It wasn’t until recently that I really began to accept myself, and it was in part thanks to people like you – people who were willing to put their stories out there and help those of us who have always known we were “different,” but never knew how much of a community there can be to support us.
So thank you.
Far less about the destination than the journey, this thoughtful, intimate, and ultimately moving portrait of an artist as she discovers, and then rediscovers over and over again, a continuously evolving self, allows insight into a psyche few are able to achieve in their own mind, let alone expound on in exquisite detail. Whether one arrives with the same viewpoint or not, it is a testament to the craft of the writer that nonetheless she is able to take you along for the ride, and impart more than just understanding, but a joy for the road traveled.
Lovely essay sis. We’ve discussed this in a variety of contexts throughout the years… but you’ve captured it perfectly. As always I love reading what you write. (perhaps this is just my night self talking…) love you.
Powerful. content, style, beauty, universal truth…. I am speechless.
Great writing.
Fantastic. The truth painted glows much beyond from what is said.
Utterly butterly delicious.
Thank you for this.
The other day on facebook I told you I wanted to kiss and also that I would forgo that because too many people would get hurt. That was only a half truth. This is what I would forego. This is what I really want to do. I want to lay you over a heavy dining room chair and spank your naked ass with my hands and my riding crop until your ass is bright red. I will not have brought the crop in from the bedroom closet but from the barn, where all the other cowboys can see it. And I would cut off every stitch of your clothing, with my bowie knife when you come into my house. Then I will lay you over a dining room chair and spank you first with my hands and then with my riding crop until your ass is red. Finally on that first meeting I would turn you over on your back and tease you with my tongue bringing you close to orgasm several times until I was sure you earned it. That’s what I would forego not to hurt your family, especially those adoreable children and your wonderful husband. I just wish I could get my browser fixed again.
Hi,
I will meet you tomorrow night at book group.
Margaret and her Mother were always there for me.
Love,
Jo
I had always preferred the night, would work off hour shifts, or hang out in the go-go bars. Have a 3am breakfast in the all night diner. People are very different at night. We are all on the prowl, looking for something. I never thought much about the difference between living life during the day, and what it is like living during the night, until reading this. Your essay has suddenly given me a context in which I can clearly see how difference the experience is.
Thank you writing and sharing it.
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment.