Five times I’ve thought of pretty words to begin this with. Five times I’ve stared at the screen. Pale, sparkling tears wash out the moniter’s gleam as I try to write. It’s all blindness, at any rate. Why try to see Truth with a single candle?

What a lark! Virginia Woolf, Wistana Symborska, Sylvia Path all sneer at me. . . their words, my heart. What a plunge! You, a poet! You, madam-- are best suited for a few bitter fairy tales for the children you ought to carry. Yes, you write prettily. It’s charming, really. Don’t cherish the hopes of anything more. You’ll squander what paltry talent your life prizes.

My life. A mere certainty of it is this: poetry must break faith with prose. Life and love can’t hold counsel together. That is the greatest fiction of literature. Humanity wants too much. A woman can’t be successful and loved in the same moment.

I can’t, at any rate. I give too much, too willingly. Love is too alluring. I long for it as I want nothing else. It’s so desperate, just clinging to a thin ledge in a world that is colder than silence. Friendship, romance, love. My family loves me; the rest of the world couldn’t give a damn. Oh, they like me. But I want someone to listen to me, to try, to attempt, to want to understand.

I don’t mean to rail against my friends. I truly do care for all of you, and I’m glad that you’re there for me. I don’t want to burden anyone with my problems-- I should be able to carry them myself. I know you try, and I’m thankful-- what a ridiculous word, gratiude is an emotion so enslaved to duty-- for you. But I hurt inside tonight. I feel as if “I’ve given my love to a world that didn’t want it anyway.”

I’ll have a good cry and feel better for having unleashed myself with my pen, and then return to usual self. But I am-- more than “half-sick of shadows.” And there is still a choice to be made, and soon. Life or love? Emily or Marianne, Camille or Camie, the writer or the woman?

Do I have hold the right to claim the heart of a poet?

It was raining today, great shuddering gasps of water falling in silvery clashes against the sidewalk, so I decided to forgo my usual two-dollar lunch at the bakery (walking distance ten minutes, which in itself is no distance except to my sore feet) and try the cozy pizza/pasta restuarant at the wake of the stairs. Those steps that rush down like the wake of a waterfall are dangerously wonderful. If you aren't carefully placing one sneaker-shod foot on the center of the slippery concrete, you might slide down the pale, chipped concrete banister.

The restuarant was warm and soft; it possesses the virtue of adapting the temperature beautifully. In melting hot July, when the air just presses heavily like an unwelcome breath, it is a splatter of fresh sprinkler droplets, and in the chilly pass of later summer rain, the rooms turn to a hot drink by the fireplace. It was all expectantancy-- I always have the knack of slipping in some fifteen minutes prior to a crowd-- and the server seated me with barely a dubious look. I shrugged out of my light jacket and gave myself to the menu, eyes wandering idly for what looks inexpensive and appetizing. I finally order a bowl of soup and plate of pasta, feeling strangely grown-up as I did when small and looked to Mama for a cue to begin to speak. I ate my lunch almost as an afterthought while tracing the italicized memories of Randolph and Christabel in Possession. Reading, devouring letters, tiny butterfly wishes across heavy pages. Feeling the strange, desperate need of Christabel for Randolph, my mouth absently opening for another bite of Alfredo Fettucini. The craving need to know who wrote the poetry that is at the very core of your heart's longing.

Some people say that it takes years to feel comfortable to be able to eat alone with only a book for company.

I don't think I need trouble myself about that particular social grace.

Sometimes I retreat a little too deeply into myself, bind my hair up a little too tightly and cover too much of the heavy braids. And then it hurts that no one seems to care-- or even notice that there's something amiss with my smile, that I'm silent while they cheerfully talk in a roomful of intimate strangers. That I do the things they ask of me quietly, without any cheerful reply.

And then I listen to music, and think of a woman clapping her hands in a smooth, escalating pattern of rhythm, and see the rapturous tears falling on her high cheekbones as the light falls in steady celestial streams on her sleek cap of hair. I notice the small, tight exchanges of anger between two people, a disagreement wrapped tightly around each other, I see couples walking, their fingers shyly brushing together as they laugh in the warmth of harmony. I taste honey sweetness on my tongue as I take a bit of a bagel and butter for a snack, and smooth my embroidered coverlet with my fingertips.

And it reminds me, that however cliched and tired the maxim is, it is still true.

You are not alone.