For Your Step Following and Damned if I Look Back

March 23 2009.

Listening to Aimee Mann’s 31 Today. What will I do when I’m 31? I hope everything has come in together by the seams. We’re just caught up in our own solipsism, but there is no reason my life should be any different than anyone else’s. Listened to I Dreamed a Dream- the best actresses’ voices break with sadness, and I get too caught up in things that never happened, but happen every day. Landslide, sung by Fleetwood Mac, always makes me cry.

Heading towards an existential crisis. I knew it when I was rooting through my piles of unwashed clothing in my landfill, hoping to turn over two clean socks in my hands. Kept refilling the kettle and slurping down noodles in the early hours, and as I closed my books with a creak, the sun rose.

Mania last weekend in Bruiser’s room. She watched the rocking back and forth with laughter until crying, and when my mouth turned, she said, Oh! And I screeched around corners, and hugged everyone too tightly, and when Bitter Boy came, fell all over him, all too fast and too bright. Or- it’s just my reoccurring trip- Bruiser still sees moving paisley in plain carpet and brick walls, and I have bouts of yearning where I look out of Susan and see the trees and see the sky and everything is still, and it is not enough.

Rose said, Time is moving so quickly, and I spread out my fingers out, pleating the colours of her bedspread between them, and said, Oh. But it’s always moved that fast.

Dad called, asking, Who is Sylvia Plath? I sighed at him until I heard the strain in his voice, and he said, pleadingly, plaintively, her son, her son. How very fragile we are. How I wish I could have saved you.

There is something so delicate in you, that I thought we would break when our lips touched. Is it just because of age? When I was your age, I had scars of my favorite poems, spike gauges and tear drop tattoos, a easy jean zipper, a crown. Tied by my wrists down during the dark nights, tongue wet with lies, apparitions and a separation by a sheet of tissue paper from the world beneath. We all love and lose. I loved a girl and I got onstage to rend my clothes in front of hundreds for her. Forget you said anything? I only forget the truth.

I owe the world so much. On Never Let Me Go, the book that changed everything: “This extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel isn’t about cloning, or being a clone, at all. It’s about why we don’t explode, why we don’t just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.”

I want to gather you all up in my arms. I will rock you and read you to sleep.