I recently finished reading Kathryn Harrison's memoir, "The Kiss" which details a very sad and very abusive relationship with her father. I came across this passage which shows her hunger for her dad, which I think is beautiful and relatable. I think that her yearning for him was confusing and overpowering but also innocent. Her father, on the other hand, took advantage of her vulnerability to abuse her.

Anyway, taking the context away, I am very much in love with this passage and her raw way of describing the feeling. In particular, the way she describes his "gaze" is important to me. Growing up, I was never really seen by my family. Not in the real sense of the word. My T's gaze is the first time I felt like I was being seen. My yearning for T is not unlike Kathryn's innocent yearning for a father she never had.

“Intelligent eyes, enraptured eyes, luminous, stricken, brilliant, spellbound, spellbinding eyes. I don’t know it yet, not consciously, but I feel it: my father, holding himself so still and staring at me, has somehow begun to see me into being. His look gives me to myself, his look reflects the life my mother’s wilfully shut eyes denied. Looking at him looking at me, I cannot help but fall painfully, precipitously in love. And my loving him is inseparable from a piercing sense of loss. Whenever I am alone…I find myself crying. How am I to endure this new despair? How can it be that I am 20 years old, that I’ve grown up without a father, only to meet him now when it’s too late, when childhood is over, lost?”

Maybe some of you can relate to this.