Sofia’s unrequited longing for Ingrid

Sofia Papastergiadis’s longing for Ingrid Bauer is shaped by an uneven intimacy: moments of bodily closeness and deliberate tenderness are followed by reminders that Ingrid’s attention belongs elsewhere. The desire becomes vivid through touch, gifts, and recurring images, but Sofia cannot settle what she wants from Ingrid or what Ingrid’s gestures mean.

The attraction and its first bodily expression

At the beach, Sofia and Ingrid lie side by side after running to the rocks, listening to each other breathe beneath a blue kite. When Ingrid’s phone rings in the back pocket of her shorts, they move closer and kiss as the tide comes in. Sofia feels the water cover her ankles and thinks of the constellations on her laptop’s screensaver; Ingrid holds her shoulder, squeezing the purple welts left by a medusa sting. The pain does not interrupt the kiss. The phone does: Ingrid answers, addresses Matthew, and mouths that she is very late while looking at Sofia. Sofia, confused, stands and walks away without turning when Ingrid calls her name. Intimacy and interruption arrive in the same scene, making the kiss real without making its meaning secure.

Intimacy, care, and the limits of naming

Ingrid’s attention repeatedly arrives through gestures that can be read as tenderness but do not resolve the relationship. She tells Sofia that she has discussed Sofia’s lack of transport with Matthew, who offers to collect the car from the Gómez Clinic. The practical help places Sofia within Ingrid’s concern, yet Matthew remains part of the arrangements, underscoring the life Ingrid shares with someone else. The boundary between closeness and uncertainty appears more sharply in a later intimate encounter: Ingrid calls Sofia a monster, leans over her, and licks honey from her lips. Sofia agrees to have her lie beside her, then begins to panic and wants Ingrid to leave but cannot find a way to ask. Ingrid laughs when Sofia gives the reason of needing water for her mother and asks why she does not simply say she wants her gone. Their bodily intimacy is direct; Sofia’s difficulty naming what she wants is not.

A gift gives that unspoken attachment a more durable form. Ingrid presents Sofia with a yellow silk halter-neck top, explaining that the silk will soothe her jellyfish stings. She has sewn Sofia’s initials, SP, into one corner in blue thread and embroidered “Beloved” beneath them. Sofia experiences the word as alien to herself, while the garment carries the smell of Ingrid’s shampoo, manuka honey, and pepper. Neither woman discusses the inscription, but both know it is there. Ingrid’s sewing makes affection visible without requiring a declaration: she says she can sew onto almost any material if she has the right needle, though silk is her preferred fabric. Later, Sofia watches Ingrid pause beside a table set for two before moving on to her real life, and wonders what it means to be beloved by her. The question persists precisely because the gift declares something the relationship itself does not settle.

The kiss as an image of desire and uncertainty

After the kiss, Sofia and Ingrid do not discuss what happened. Instead, Sofia finds it recurring in ordinary things they make together: coconut ice cream, the seeds Ingrid scrapes from a vanilla pod with her penknife, and the mixture of egg yolks and cream. The kiss seems to linger in Ingrid’s eyelids and in the blue thread of her needlework, becoming a presence that neither woman names. Yet this recurrence does not give Sofia certainty. She wonders what she wants from Ingrid, why Ingrid enjoys humiliating her, and why she puts up with it; she even describes herself as having consented to being undermined. The longing is therefore not simply a hope for closeness. It is bound to an awareness that Ingrid’s gestures can draw Sofia in while leaving her vulnerable and unsure of her own terms.

That uncertainty takes a more openly romantic shape in Sofia’s image of a woman riding across the beach. On the burning sand, the rider’s horse thunders beside the glittering sea; she holds a giant bow and arrow, and the arrow enters Sofia’s heart. Sofia describes herself as wounded by desire and ready for love’s ordeal. The passage gives the longing a force and direction that the relationship itself lacks: in the image, desire becomes an unmistakable wound, while in life Sofia cannot decide what Ingrid’s attention means. The contrast makes the fantasy less a resolution than a measure of how intensely Sofia feels—and how little that intensity can guarantee in return.

Naming, speech, and what remains unspoken

The uncertainty surrounding Ingrid’s gestures sits within a broader pattern in which naming can expose a relationship without settling its meaning. At the consultation, Dr Gómez notices that Rose’s first name is Rose and asks permission to use it. Rose agrees, insisting that it is her name and that there is no reason he should not address her as her daughter does. Dr Gómez then turns to Sofia Papastergiadis to ask whether she calls her mother Rose; Sofia answers quickly, as if the matter were unimportant, and notes that this is the second time in three days she has been asked. The exchange makes a form of intimacy visible to an outsider, much as Ingrid’s gift makes affection visible, while leaving the meaning of that intimacy open to question.

Later, Rose and Sofia briefly share Greek during a formal discussion. Rose had taught Sofia the language from about the age of three, though they rarely spoke it at home, probably as a way of punishing Christos. Sofia has worked hard to erase Greek, yet it continues to accompany her since her father left the family home. Rose uses it to make a joke about the stereotype of being born in Yorkshire, ending in English by saying she does not own a whippet. Their laughter offers a moment of complicity, but it does not erase their tension: Rose has interrupted Sofia’s account by insisting that her daughter’s first-class degree means jargon is no problem and by making the interruption sound like praise. Julieta Gómez watches them with anguish, while the assessment loses its track and the questionnaire’s claim to truth gives way to their detour through shared language and family history.

These scenes do not answer what Ingrid means to Sofia. Instead, they sharpen the distinction between speaking a relationship into view and being able to define it. Sofia and Rose can move, however briefly, through a language they share; with Ingrid, the kiss and the embroidered word Beloved persist without a conversation that would establish what either woman intends. Sofia’s longing remains unresolved not because it lacks signs, but because signs of closeness—names, touch, care, and words carried by cloth—do not amount to an agreed account of the bond.