Sometimes longing comes up like a storm. Sometimes it comes down like a downpour. Sometimes it rumbles like heavy weather, and, just sometimes, it splits clean through your being, worse than falling lightning. But it is when longing draws in gradually, to pour down after a quick catching of breath, cheerful and steady, that it becomes therapy. Therapeutic longing brings you back into contact with yourself. Who you are, and who you were. Whom you love, and what you love. As longing's flood-mark pushes upwards, emotions that cannot swim drown, and only what is of value survives.

Longing that has grown old and gap-toothed no longer has enough teeth to hurt you — time's way of putting distance between us and pain. Longing is everyone's soulmate. Because every one of us, every so often, is homesick for snippets out of our childhood, or our youth, or our cowardice, or our being-together. We all cherish homesickness for someone. Or for a place, or for a moment, or for moments. Time loses its sharpness, and when memories grow softly outlined and vague, we automatically focus on the whole picture rather than on particular parts of it. Everything becomes fluid, and foreground and background, small and large, important and unimportant, harmonise more easily into a meaningful whole. It is our hearts' way of making peace and taking leave and letting go. It is a way of becoming whole and of binding the chapters of your life into one book — your own story.

Sometimes a chapter is a week long, sometimes a day, sometimes it runs over years. As at the end of any story, some chapters make you laugh or inspire you, and others make you weep. Sometimes people think their book is closed while everyone else is still reading it. Sometimes an open book is shut because it cannot be read. The better you understand your own story, the better you are able to interpret someone else's. To judge a book not on the grounds of a single chapter but on the grounds of its ending. One chapter does not make a whole book. And if the chapter of the present has a sad ending, it does not follow that the next one will end the same way. Time makes room. Room for starting over and for starting differently. For a new chapter.

A full-grown human being has come together in the sum-total of all the incidents of his life — where the good and the bad provide the contrasts. Our hearts have the unrivalled ability, like a needle with thread, to string together all the loose incidents of our lives so that nothing gets blown away. If your own book is thin and its ending predictable, let your heart help to bind the falling-apart chapters of someone else's, so that the story is not lost, and with it the writer.

Love in the manner of longing is a hardcover binding for any book whose loose pages threaten to fall apart. Longing is the needle and love is the thread. The cover — people who care.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer