"we'll take up where we left off, esther," she had said, with her sweet, martyr's smile. "we'll act as if all this were a bad dream."
a bad dream.
to the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
a bad dream.
i remembered everything.
i remembered the cadavers and doreen and the story of the fig-tree and marco's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds i gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a grey skull.
maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.
but they were part of me. they were my landscape

who's to say? who's to say when you're out the door and when you're not? because everything is dead. dead as the silent still desert night. there are no lines and everything is grain after grain after grain. sometimes i think i can make it and i take a gulp of air and gallop into the world. at the end of it rancour fills my heart and lungs and i go back to my room to vomit