The beer tastes good to my throat, cold and bitter, and the three boys and the beer and the queer freeness of the situation make me feel like laughing forever. So I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can. I am looking very healthy and flushed and bright eyed, having both a good tan and a rather excellent fever.
The hurt is not intense when one is hardened to the cold.
I lay back in the car and let the colored lights come at me, the music from the radio, the reflection of the guy driving. It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain... remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted. When you feel that this may be the good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder.
Thirty years now I have laboured to dredge the slit from your throat. I am none the wiser.
My consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars – to be a part of scene, anonymous, listening, recording – all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery.
I will be a little god in my small way.
I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me; all day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?
I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...
I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge.
After each wave it would fade away and leave me limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over and then I would feel it rising up in me again, and the glittering white torture-chamber tiles under my feet and over my head and on all four sides closed in and squeezed me to pieces.
I am sitting in my room, looking out at a scene of snow pouring down with ice and sleet and thinking of how sometimes people are really wonderful after all.
I don’t like this life; but I do it. Like a good girl.
When Ted and I begin living together we shall become a team better than Mr. and Mrs. Yeats – he being a competent astrologist, reading horoscopes, and me being a tarot-pack reader, and, when we have enough money, a crystal-gazer.
I do think that it is hard for me to share myself with everyone. My introspection and queer thoughts always make me feel no one will understand – except someone I love. When I love someone, I make myself increasingly vulnerable to them – and give them the power to hurt me by letting them know my sensitive spots.
By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.
Now I know what the girl meant in “Celia Amberley” when she said: “If he will kiss me, everything will be all right; I’ll be pretty again.
Perhaps that’s why I want to be everyone – so no one can blame me for being I.
I felt what the 19th century romantics must have felt: The extension of the soul into the realm of nature.
I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now while I’m still little, because when I grow up I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.