Gwendoline Riley’s Phantom Lives

What will it take to be fulfilled by life? Love, perhaps, or community, power, or professional success. At different points in my life I believed that having my work published would make me happy, or leaving the country, going back to school, getting a literary agent. I thought a new girlfriend might do it, or a new apartment. Some of these I achieved; some I’ve yet to; one or two, thankfully, are long behind me. And you know what? They did, at one point or another, satisfy me. Yet there has always been another waypoint, another goalpost, somewhere further along the way.