A young woman fell in love with the man who sent her to court someone else

A young woman named Viola washes up on the coast of a country called Illyria after a shipwreck. She has no idea whether her twin brother made it out of the water.

She cuts her hair, puts on men's clothes, calls herself Cesario, and goes into service with the Duke, Orsino.

He comes to trust her with his private thoughts. Before long, she is in love with him.

He does not know she is a woman. He is busy being in love with a countess named Olivia, who will not even see him.

So he sends Viola to plead his case to Olivia. She goes, and she pleads it beautifully, which is its own private kind of torture.

In this scene they are alone together, with music playing. Orsino tells her, with complete confidence, that no woman's heart is big enough to hold a love as large as his.

She cannot say "mine is." So she tells the story as if it belonged to another daughter.

A blank, my lord.

That is what she calls her own life, out loud, to the man she loves, while he sits a few feet away and hears nothing.

Now look at what she does. She tells him the truth by putting herself inside the story as if she were someone else, giving herself just enough distance to say it.

Do not skim this. A woman who cannot say what she wants has invented a second woman just to get permission to describe the wanting.

I know you have done this. "A friend of mine is thinking about," you said at lunch, and you watched every face to see if anybody guessed.

She sat like Patience on a monument. Not in a chair, not by a window. On a monument.

Stone. Somewhere people walk past and admire how still she is.

That is what we have been taught to call grace. To wait so politely that nobody knows we are waiting, and to be praised for how well we are taking it.

Four hundred years ago a man put those words in a young woman's mouth, and let her answer the man who thought he knew more about love than she did. Men say more, swear more, she tells him, and it means less.

Listen to that. She is standing there in borrowed clothes, telling the man who thinks men love more deeply that his certainty is wrong.

And the woman in the story never told. Viola does not tell him yet.

Not in this scene, and not soon. But eventually she does, and he hears it.

Your want has been sitting on that monument a long time. It is not stone. It has only been very, very still.

This play is free. It is four hundred years old, and some of us first met it as a teen comedy on a soccer field.

Today. Copy the six lines from "A blank, my lord" down to "Smiling at grief" by hand, slowly, the way she would have had to say them. Then, underneath, write one sentence about your own want in the first person. No sister in it, no friend, no "someone I know." Nobody has to see it but the page.

In March of the year I could not write, I copied a page of Cranford and put two words underneath it. "Not yet."

I remember being annoyed with myself, because it sounded like giving up. I closed the notebook and did not open it for a week.

It took me years to notice the second word. Somebody who has given up does not write "yet."