Indelicacy

Still in the process of becoming, the soul makes room.

I wanted to sit quietly in front of the window as the cat did. I wanted to show my excitement like the dog.

Yes, you're changing. But the best parts of you are still here.

I hated March more than any other month, with its promises of warmth that never came

You try to make yourself abnormal on purpose," he said. "You think it makes you better than the other people around you.

What makes you do it, then?' 'My soul,' I said boldly. I didn't care how it sounded.

I, on the other hand, spent those days lost in my reading. I sat in front of the fire sometimes with my husband, and sometimes alone. I forgot where I was, so forceful were the settings and characters in those books I read, so fine and deep. Yet when I came to, it wasn't unpleasant. In fact, it pleased me very much.

was true, I was mean sometimes. But I didn’t have it in me to be kind to someone who saw me only in relation to property and propriety.

We were born to die, but death can feel unreal if we’re comforted in the right ways.

I wanted to tell her about my writing, but I was afraid she would think I was exaggerating my relationship to it, that I was lying. After all, I wasn't a real writer, yet I wrote every day. Though I hadn't cleaned for a while, to say that I was a maid would probably have been a more accurate way to explain who I was.

Writing was not the only thing I wanted to do, but the important thing, I thought, was that I wanted to do it more than anything else. I would write for an entire day, then do nothing for days on end. I'd look at my notebook and feel bored. After some time, however, it was my life that was boring, and I missed writing, so I would begin to write again.

In books I found even more strongly my desire to write, to write back to them and their jagged, perfect words. I found life that ran close to my own

Why is empty space a comfort and a relief? It's not because I project myself there; it's because I can't. It shows me my projections, but they haven't left my mind. Empty space remains empty, always. And for a little while a small part of me can be empty too.

Then I was alone and I didn't like it. Maybe I should be alone always, I thought

Why did I get so dressed up when no one would see me? It is better that way, to give fancy things to my writing and my own mind, better than wasting them on people I don't like,

Later on we would all be dead, but the cabinet would remain, and the people who used it would be different, though likely related to the ones who had used it before.

I would listen to a bird cry, or the cat and the dog scratching around. In those moments I felt like a giant ear.

We all carry our lives in us, not just our problems or nightmares, but something of what we were before.

Occasionally a man would walk by and ask what I was doing. "A menu for a dinner party," I would say. Or, "I am writing down my dreams." When too many men had walked by with this same question, or some version of it, I said, "Your face looks like the butt of a wolf and it's interfering with my concentration." I was a rich woman now; I could say these things.