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Overcast skies, clouds strolling by
Signs of an approaching cold front
Rain coming to wash and cleanse us--
Drenching the soil.
And we need it.

Flowers bloom, refreshed by the downpour--
They come to life.
And we need it.
To remind us once again
Of the beauty of simply
Being Alive.

(spring 2009)

For they have built the walls of their citadels of steel, and their temples of rock, and they swell within. Also have they lit the dark with colored neons, and the streets are lanced with shooting stars... Vain flash the proud lights in the city of man, red, blue, green, yellow and white. Color of apple, color of grape, of pear, of corn. Clear flash the proud lights, lord, and your far wheeling beacons pale, those far fixed stars, and the planets withered, shrunken, twirl in their forgotten orbits, pale, lord, in the light-bleached sky. In the white cold glare from the city of man.... Vain sound the proud horns in the city of man, sax, trombone, jazz, blues. Color of love, color of mourning, color of hot, color of crying. And all your noisy rains and thunders can not quench his inwardness. Down bands the window where rain rattles in, and in the steamy haze within, loudly brazen the bands begin.

Early in the morning, when the sun is still cool, and the breeze is wet and salt-fresh from the sea, the native women, dressed in black, with black stockings, go to the open market in the center of town with their wicker baskets to bargain and buy fresh fruit and vegetables at the stalls: yellow plums, green peppers, large ripe tomatoes, wreathes of garlic, bunches of yellow and green bananas, potatoes, green beans, squashes and melons. Gaudy striped beach towels, aprons and rope sneakers are hung up for sale against the white adobe pueblos. Within the dark cavern of the stores are great jugs of wine, oil and vinegar in woven straw casings.

Now this is all, and you must know it. But you must also let me know by some means that you know it. If you are not too scrupulous and why, now, are you? You might write me a letter and tell me honestly, why, if you do not fear my childish pleadings, which are far far away and dead after today, why you refuse to let me make a few days of spring with you in Paris? I am coming, and I feel it is somehow now honestly superfluous and much too abstract and stringent of you to pretend there is left any important reason why you do not wish to see me. I know if I were coming in a chaos, a turmoil of accusations, or even making it harder to leave you again (which it may well be, but it is possible to manage this) - - - I know then that you would have a right to forbid. But all I want is to see you, be with you, walk, talk, in a way which I imagine people past the age of love could do (although I am not pretending I would not passionately want to be with you) but we have come into the time and understanding where we could be most kind and good to each other. Even if those eternal years are upon us, why do you now refuse to see me?

One relies so on single symbols which supposedly presage large assumptions. he goes to ballets, ergo he must be sensitive & artistic. he quotes poetry, ergo he must be a kindred spirit. he reads joyce, ergo he must be a genius. let's face it, I am in danger of wanting my personal absolute to be a demigod man, and as there aren't many around, I often unconsciously manufacture my own. and then, I retreat and revel in poetry and literature where the reward value is tangible and accepted. I really do not think deeply. really deeply. I want a romantic nonexistant hero.

Dear Doctor: I am feeling very sick. I have a heart in my stomach which throbs and mocks. Suddenly the simple rituals of the day balk like a stubborn houre. It gets impossible to look people in the eye: corruption may break out again? Who knows. Small talk becomes desperate. Hostility grows, too. That dangerous, deadly venom which comes from a sick heart. Sick min, too. The image of identity we must daily right to impress on the neutral, or hostile, world, collapses inward; we feel crushed.

I am not simply telling you this because I want to be noble; I very much DIDN'T want to be noble. That most intimate immediate woman (which makes me, ironically, so much yours) tormented me into delusion: that I could ever free myself from you. Really, how ridiculous it was... When even you, and even what gods there are, can not free me...?

I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer to NOT feel, NOT to let the world touch one.

Three years ago, the hot sticky August rain fell big and wet as I sat listlessly on my porch at home, crying over the way summer would not come again - never the same. The first story in print came from that "never again" refrain beat out by the rain. August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

Today: clear, flung, blue, pine-chills, orange needles underfoot. Writing weather, after three days of murking clouds, rain-silver tinselly rain, all theatrical and limpid big drops on Monday, then the deluge, cold, straight, and quite magnificent. We sat out on the dripping porch in chairs, rain pooling the green plastic seat covers, smearing the screen with translucent panes of water, seeping into the dry fissured ground.

I could see it, if you thought your being with me would bind me to you more, or give me less freedom to find someone else, but knowing now, as I do and you must, that I am so far bled white that no mere abstinance of knives can cure me, why do you forbid our making the small, limited world we have. Why so tabu? I ask you to ask yourself this. And if you have the courage or understanding in you, to tell me.

I must be lean and write and make worlds beside this to live in.

It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no further.

I feel now as if I were building a very delicate intricate bridge quietly in the night, across the dark from one grave to another while the giant is sleeping. Help me build this o so exquisite bridge.

I need Plot: people growing: banging into each other & into circumstances: stewpot citizens: growing & hurting & loving & making the best of various bad jobs.

A sickness, frenzy of resentment at everything, but myself at the bottom. I lie wakeful at night, wake exhausted with that sense of razor-shaved nerves. I must be my own doctor. I must cure this very destructive paralysis & ruinous brooding & daydreaming.

I suppose I'll always be over-vulnerable, slightly paranoid. But I'm also so damn healthy & resilient. And apple-pie happy. Only I've got to write. I feel sick, this week, of having written nothing lately.

What to do with anger, ask her. One thing to say: Yes, I want the world's praise, money & love, and am furious with anyone, especially with anyone I know or has had a similar experience, getting ahead of me. Well, what to do when this surges up over & over? ...

Nothing bitterness in self, so she finds nothing of sweetness in outside world. Vicious Cycle.

vivid presence rules despotic over pale shadows of past & future.

Feathery-gray French towns gave way to clusters of blinding white pueblos; small green fields fanned out into hot yellow plains of rye. Over-head, the noon sky blazed blue-white, and against the flat stretches of grain moved the dark figures of tanned workers in sombreros and their donkeys.

I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.

... this is what I was meant to make for a man, and to give him this colossal reservoir of faith and love for him to swim in daily...

I can take even the harder horror of letting myself melt into feeling again, and knowing it must freeze again, if only I can believe it is making a minute part of time and space better than it would have been by stubbornly staying always apart when we have so little time to be near.

I am stymied, stuck, at a stasis. Some paralysis of the head has got me frozen... As if I can escape by going numb and daring to begin nothing. Everything seems held up, what is it? ...

I gasp and let out a sigh. I gaze at [him]. I adore him. He is the most wonderful person alive. I am suddenly struck by the fact that he is unlike anyone else in the world. How many people could love me like this? ... Who could? Who would? Why would they? Why does [he]?

That's what madness looks like: a small woman in baggy red pajamas sitting on a kitchen chair, her feet dangling above the ground, trying to figure out how to eat and eclair while everyone she knows and loves watches her closely, as if she's a rat in a cage, to see what will happen next...

She wouldn't understand that I am chosen to speak for all the sorrows of the world.

I come bounding up the steps in front of our house: the lilac is blooming! I rush into it, fling my arms around it, bury my face in the heavy-scented flowers. I look over at the garden: the snow is gone, and the beds are bare but for the broken gray stalks and dead leaves that fall left behind, but the lawn is green, and a few bulbs have sent up tiny shoots, barely there, and there are two absurd yellow tulips, blooms bobbing in the soft spring breeze, it's spring. And with spring comes the joy that lives beneath the difficult times. The joy is an absurd yellow tulip, popping up in my life, contradicting all the evidence that shows it should not be there.

But I do my best. I go home to my empty condo, buy some real food, and eat like a normal person. I pay the bills that have piled up, return the phone calls, get back to work. I write the lectures that I'm scheduled to give at a couple universities in February and March. It's winter. Winter brings the blues. I'm afraid of them coming, and I know they will. My only hope is that I can get through the winter without going back to the hospital. If I can do this, then maybe I can stop hating myself. I think, if I just keep going, keep doing what they say, take the meds, go to sleep, use the light box, get out of the house, get some exercise, eat enough, try to avoid stress, then maybe I can do it. They don't tell you how to manage grief. And I miss Jeff so much it's killing me. But there's nothing I can do about that now. All I can do is keep going forward. Maybe this way I can make it to April. Just this once.

I don't know how long I've been in my house. It's dark. Last I checked it was day. I think I've thrown up seven times today. I'm so dehydrated I can barely walk, and I'm crawling down the hall. The eating disorder has gotten too bad. It's not working. I see it for what it is: an attempt to control a self that I felt was completely out of control, a life that was falling apart. And it has done nothing but make the bipolar worse, and ruin my body in the process.

"I'm okay," I say. "They're just thoughts. I don't have a plan." The doctors always ask if you're having suicidal ideation -thinking about death, fantasizing about killing yourself, even when you don't want to - which I am, and if so, whether or not you have a plan, which I don't. I know myself well enough to realize that if we went to the emergency room, I would miraculously get better. I would show no signs of madness. It's called plausible sanity. It's a product of what they call lack of insight: when you're very sick, you don't have any perspective. You truly believe you're well, so you report that you're well. You act cheerful, put-together, and completely sane. You're articulate and very persuasive, and you explain to them that there's been a terrible mistake - you're not really crazy, and this ridiculous trip to the hospital is just a friend over reacting, or your family trying to trap you, or your spouse trying to get back at you for something...

Soon they hypomania morphs into something dark. The eating disorder has taken hold for real. It's no longer just a few symptoms I was using to try to control the moods. It's taken on a life of its own. I am eating next to nothing, spending hours every day at the gym, standing on the scale four, five times a day, consumed with the fear of gaining weight, with the fear that the writing is going badly, with the fear that Jeff and I aren't going to make it, with the fear that I will always be alone, or go crazy again, or spend my life in an institution. So I channel all the vague, amorphous, all-encompassing fears that have come to rule my days and nights into a fierce desire to lose weight. And more weight.

The feeling of confidence I got from moving into my own place and doing everything right has been replaced with the familiar, violent self-hatred I know. I had everything, and I lost it. Instead of hating the illness, I hate myself.

Years later, after we're married, we will cry about that time. I should have seen it, he'll say, I was such an idiot, how could I not see? We will put our foreheads together, and I will tell him, again and again, that he could not have seen.

It is crucial to notice the language we use when we talk about our bodies. We speak as if there was one collected perfrect body, a singular entity that we're all after. The trouble is, I think we are after that one body. We grew up with the impression that underneath all this normal flesh, buried deep in the excessive recesses of our healthy bodies, there was a Perfect Body just waiting to break out. It would look exactly like everyone else's perfect body. A clone of the shapeless, androgynous models, the hairless, silicone-implanted porn stars, Somehow we, in defiance of nature, would have toothpick thighs and burgeoning bosoms, buns of steel and dainty firm delts. As Andy Warhol wrote, "The more you look at the same exact thing... the better and emptier you feel."

I was not as I appeared. I liked that. I was a magician. No one could see what I hid underneath, and I didn't want them to, because what I hid seemed raw. Excessively hot and red.

I have had the working assumption, since I was very small, that nothing was as it appeared. Appearances were not to be trusted. In fact, nothing was to be trusted. Things existed in layers, and under the layer lay another layer... Everything was about context. Everything was costume and makeup, and the role that one played.

You can, perhaps, forsee a serious of terrifically dramatic relationships in my future, all ending with me in an Ophelian heap in my quilt. I had a love affair with books, with the characters and their worlds. Books kept me company. When the voices of the book faded, as with the last long chord of a record, the back cover crinkling closed, I could swear I heard a door click shut.

I stayed at home to read and eat, or more accurately, to be fed-passive tense-and to disappear into the world in my head, the world I read of in books. ... the kind of book that might stave off the world at large a bit longer than the others. I was perpetually grief-sticken when I finished a book, and would slide down from my sitting position on the bed, put my cheek on the pillow and sigh for a long time.

Food has two salient qualities for all humans. First, it stirs a sense of nurturance. The physical food transubstantiates in out minds into something more ethereal, of human and emotional nurturance, a sense that our hungers are being sated. Even if you are just stuffing handfuls of fries into your mouth on a binge, you still feel that some emptiness, if briefly, is being filled. Second, food has a simple, chemical effect of calming the brain. Food gave me a sense that things were going to be all right. That if I just ate things in a precise fashion, if I just ate special foods-mushrooms soup, toast, tortillas with cheese, scrambled eggs-my brains would stay still, the world would stop spinning, and I would have a focal point for my eyes: the book beside the plate, the food, the project at hand. Things would remain calm.

Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecedntly revealed, as though we wree used to seeing women in veils.

"Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly."

We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fanthom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that thye understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.

They receeded from us, from the other girls, from their father, and we caught sight of them standing in the courtyard, under drizzle, taking bites from the same doughnut, looking up at the sky, letting themselves get slowly drenched.

He began to weep, looking out from the garage, as music filled the street like air. "It was the kind of music they play when you die," he said.

It occured to us that she and the girls read secret signs of misery in cloud formations, that despite the discrepancy in their ages something timeless communicated itself between them, as though she were advising the girls in her mumbling Greek, "Don't waste your time on life."

Later, when other acquaintances chose to end their lives-- sometimes even borrowing a book the day before-- we always pictured them as taking off cumbersome boots to enter the highly associative mustiness of a family cottage on a dune overlooking the sea. Every one of them had read the signs of misery Old Mrs. Karafilis had written, in Greek, in the clouds. On different paths, with different-colored eyes or jerkings of the head, they had deciphered the secret to cowardice or barvery, whichever it was. And the Lisbon girls were always there before them. They had killed themselves over our dying forest, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

But this is all a chasing after the wind. The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decision better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind. What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. Her brain going dim to all else, but flaming up at precise points of pain, personal injury, lost dreams. Every other loved one receding as though across a vast ice floe, shrinking to black dots waving tiny arms, out of hearing. Then the rope thrown over the beam, the sleeping pill dropped in the palm with the long, lying lifeline, the window thrown open, the oven turned on, whatever. They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us. We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm. And we had to smear our muzzles in their last traces, of mud marks on the floor, trunks kicked out from under them, we had to breathe forever the air of the rooms in which they killed themselves. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and they hadn't heard us caling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with out thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.