A Room Made of Leaves

I could so easily never have learned things that would stay with me now until I died: that I was complete as I was, with all my flaws and all my strengths. That I took up space in the world, and that I was entitled to that space.

That was a place a person had to travel through alone. I met there a cold indifferent truth: that every person -- even a loved person, and I was not loved -- was alone. On the whole globe, there was no one but myself, and I was shaken and torn down to the merest speck of being.

We were two sets of people inhabiting the same space, each set going about its affairs as if the other were not there.

Do not believe too quickly!

By now I had learned enough about the narrowness of a woman’s choices to guess that they were not all harlots, only less lucky than I had been.

What he and I had made together was honest and important. But his orbit, like mine, lay elsewhere. We had been given a gift from the universe, a momentary precious conjunction. It was not meant to last, only to be valued and its lesson taken to heart.

There was an almost frightening breadth and depth and height to the place, alive with openness and the wild energy of breeze and trees and the crying gulls and the brilliant water. Alone, a speck of human in a place big enough to swallow me, I looked about with eyes that seemed open for the first time.

I felt myself to be as big as the night, free, a thing with no boundaries. The sky was infinite, the stars blazed like the exhilaration that filled me, their shifting pulses and shimmer a promise of time, space, eternity, all the things a woman never had. I was at last free to find my own size, and I was gigantic.

But the idea was stronger than the impossibility of it. Even to recognise that longing and give voice to it was a kind of power.

But each new vexation brought the memory of the last, and the fact that it had been solved. Vexation was vexing, but idleness was like death.

When a dangerous dog falls ill, who will come to help?

The creature that was me had crept away and left nothing more than the shell of a woman curled up on the bunk.

For me, being together, fellow souls joined in fear, was some comfort. For him, that was weakness. In taking his hand I was telling him what I had seen, and that was something he could not allow.

But then I had unfolded too wildly, too recklessly, in the wrong place and at the wrong time and with the wrong person.

had proved myself stronger than life had ever asked him to be.

A woman can do many things, but she has to bide her time.

knew that this was the world I was in now, a vile dirty place where I was alone, alone, alone.

The pain of being unloved was pushed off to a distance where it could not touch. I became like those flat shining beetles that live in the heart of a rotten log, a creature of no dimension, able to disappear into the narrowest of cracks.

My husband had no one and that must be why some central part of him, some steady sense of who he was, had years ago gone like a mouse to hide away in its hole. But he could never admit the pain. He had to transmute suffering into a blade, to punish the world that made him suffer.