I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.
I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat – on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok – I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
I am both worse and better than you thought.
From the night Buddy Willard kissed me and said I must go out with a lot of boys, he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was and that everything he did like hugging and kissing and petting was simply what I made him feel like doing out of the blue, he couldn’t help it and didn’t know how it came about. Now I saw he had only been pretending all this time to be so innocent.
It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it – floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.
My heroine would be myself, only in disguise.
I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.
And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him. The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.
I am the magician’s girl who does not flinch.
He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like.
The sun, emerged from its gray shrouds of cloud, shone with a summer brilliance on the untouched slopes. Pausing in my work to overlook that pristine expanse, I felt the same profound thrill it gives me to see the trees and grassland waist-high under flood water – as if the usual order of the world had shifted slightly, and entered a new phase.
In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire.
I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.
I think I’m in love with missing you more than I’m in love with you.
I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year. After all I am alive only by accident.
There is history to read- centuries to comprehend before I sleep, millions of lives to assimilate before breakfast tomorrow.
All my life I’d told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A’s, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me.
So you got rid of your astonishment that someone could write so much more dynamically than you. You stopped cherishing your aloneness and poetic differentness to your delicately flat little bosom. You said: she’s to good to forget. How about making her a friend and competitor – you could learn alot from her. So you’ll try. So maybe she’ll laugh in your face. So maybe she’ll beat you hollow in the end. So anyhow, you’ll try, and maybe, possibly, she can stand you. Here’s hoping!
I cry at everything. Simply to spite myself and embarrass myself.
Something in me wants more. I can’t rest.