5 March 2011

Plath Heart

A dress of green velvet that to the touch is how I imagine an invisibility cloak to feel. A box made from embroidered roses, into which I can whisper worries through the gaps between petals. Presents hailing from a Hexham charity shop and The Biscuit Factory respectively. Two of my favourite places in all the world, not just Northumberland. Plus two women eating two croissants each across the table from one another. The elder let the younger finish her ice cream too.

I am reading the journals of Sylvia Plath and I am obsessed. I want to bite my lip and hug myself at the beautiful true prose and also die a little every time I turn a page. She writes of how she loves to pick her nose, of the smell of beer and cheese sandwiches, of men and women and writing writing writing. I know it's going to break my heart. More so because I think of the very real person sitting there (propped up by pillows in bed, listening to the night weather outside at times) writing of her very real feelings, her very real life. Though in Lady Lazarus she claims to be like a cat and have nine times to die, suggesting she has nine lives, she only had the one. The intelligent, fascinating, consuming one documented in the journals.

One of the epigraphs in her original notebook is a Yeats quote.
'We only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy...'

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