I have the feeling that there are places where I should have exited from this that I have not exited. Each time I see you I am struck by how little is accomplished, how little meant, feel that I am on a white road leading to eternity; I feel I must press on, hurry, trying to get to something -- and it's something I left back somewhere, somewhere I should have gotten off. Gotten off, gotten out, expressed something, entered into something, engaged, opened up; and instead, closed in a closed car, I ride silently beyond your reach, beyond the reach of all the forces which are not in my control. Only my hands at the controls press me relentlessly into the white night; I fly what I seek, and seek it in the white cloak of the future, that beginning indistinguishable from death.
Could someone entice me to stay, and could I be caught? Do I no longer want those exits, engagements, treaties? Must I ride on through the night forever, like the Headless Horseman? Night rider that I am, I drift through sleep barely dreaming; only in sleep I recognize that grey, viscous substance I thought lost with memories of the womb. My dreams float through its surface, never sounding.
12
It shakes me to realize how little you know me, or, more truly, how much you know from the merest hints and vague impressions. If I could focus my anger at you as clearly as you focus your knowledge of me, I would be well. But my burning ambition is to prick my finger and fall asleep for a hundred years, to fall asleep while the trees fall and time falls silent. Time has fallen silent for me already. It will not speak the names of the dead, and of the living it only reflects their shadows. There is no bright and dark as of childhood, no swift wind or all-saying thunder, only remnants of what was, which I pinch together and throw out like dust, or save like string. I once heard of a woman writer who said that her life was string. That is what my life is: shreds of string woven into interconnections, the string of love, of guilt, of fear. I hold out string on my two arms and you wind it into a ball, you knit life up on a spool, like lace, I am as tough as string; I feel string in my gut, string in my tendons; I am gimpy and grimy as string, crooked and worn; I eat string for dinner, I dress in string; I am string, my 1ife is string, I know nothing but string.
But, you say, surely there's more than this? I am disappointed. When you laugh, you are truly happy, and when you are sad, you are sad indeed. Your moods fly like clouds across your soul: you are not fleet enough to mirror them, and that's why you say, I am left with nothing. And, after all, what is it to be left with nothing? Isn't it better to race across the meadow after the gleams? You can never catch up, they are faster than you are; like a child you run just to run.
Oh, I tell you, but I am worn out with running, I am out of breath, there is no sitting place, I am dead tired from running after the clouds. There was somewhere I meant to go, somewhere, dark and hard compared to this soap bubble life, where I could stay and warm my hands that are wet with dew and mushrooms. This is a dank world, after all, this fairy world of fleeting light: I want a fire and coal and warm clothes on my back.
But I'm bewitched: I must run forever after the sunlight; the more I run the more I become like the light and the clouds, insubstantial, till before a good hot fire I fade away.
Oh, give me real hands, gods of darkness, that I may scrub myself till I am raw, and stand up in my shoes and say, I am myself and not another. I am tired, I am dull from becomings: the clouds becoming bright, then blotted out, the light blotted out and then streaming once again.
Well, you say, what you want is a man and children: there is your hearth, warm yourself there, like a whole woman. But I tell you, I am not sure of men: they appear bright and black and hot as fire, but you find to keep up with them, you must chase across fields of sun and shadow, and wear yourself out for nothing, just as I do here. No, I want myself --
I want the child I was, the woman I became and the end I will meet -- I want the whole.
Well, you say, you will never find it chasing after rainbows, sit down and make something; but still I say, there is too little in this world already to let go of a single cloud, or one feeling, be it light as gossamer, of my own.