Relevant excerpt
"I thought if this would never happen again, I would die.
But this is wrong. Nobody dies from a lack of sex. It's a lack of love we die from. There's nobody here I can love, all the people I could love are dead or elsewhere. Who knows where they are or what their names are now? They might as well be nowhere, as I am for them. I too am a missing person.
From time to time I see their faces against the dark, flickering like images of saints in old foreign cathedrals in the light of drafty candles; candles you would light to pray to by, kneeling, your forehead against the wooden railing, hoping for an answer. I can conjure them but they are mirages only, they don't last. Can I be blamed for wanting a real body to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my heartbeat against the bedsprings, I can stroke myself under the dry white sheets, in the dark, but I too am dry and white, hard, granular; it's like running my hand over a plateful of dried rice, it's like snow. There's something dead about it, something deserted. I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor."
-Margret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
But this is wrong. Nobody dies from a lack of sex. It's a lack of love we die from. There's nobody here I can love, all the people I could love are dead or elsewhere. Who knows where they are or what their names are now? They might as well be nowhere, as I am for them. I too am a missing person.
From time to time I see their faces against the dark, flickering like images of saints in old foreign cathedrals in the light of drafty candles; candles you would light to pray to by, kneeling, your forehead against the wooden railing, hoping for an answer. I can conjure them but they are mirages only, they don't last. Can I be blamed for wanting a real body to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my heartbeat against the bedsprings, I can stroke myself under the dry white sheets, in the dark, but I too am dry and white, hard, granular; it's like running my hand over a plateful of dried rice, it's like snow. There's something dead about it, something deserted. I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor."
-Margret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale