Psyche's Longing

"What is it?" said I, looking down at her lap where our four hands were joined.

"This," she said, "I have always - at least, ever since I can remember - had a kind of longing for death."

"Ah, Psyche," I said, "have I made you so little happy as that?"

"No, no, no," she said.  "You don't understand... It was when I was happiest that I longed most.  It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the  sunshine... where you couldn't see Glome or the palace.  Do you remember?  The colour and the smell, and looking across at the Grey Mountain in the distance?  And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing.  Somewhere else there must be more of it.  Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come!  But I couldn't (not yet) come and I didn't know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me.  I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home."

~ from Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis ~