Jane's Diary
In a box of abandoned books somewhere in Park Slope, I found the journal of a woman named Jane. It is from 1983. Jane seems psychologically off balance. She talks about daily therapy. Of multiple parts.
I have grown attached to Jane and her fear of abandonment. I carry her diary around with me wherever I go, and take comfort in her growing madness. In her fictional relationships with men named Al and Ken. I am filled with contempt at her mother and father, who remind me so much of my own when I was a child.
Sometimes, on the subway, when I see a woman in her fifties, someone who looks slightly lost and deranged, the New York state of mind, I wonder if it's Jane. But Jane probably committed suicide. The therapy bills and her inability to improve her mental health probably got the better of her. That's why her diary was lying in a box of abandoned books in Park Slope, along with Milton and Mann and Kerouac.
She was a failed painter. She was a tragedy. I know nothing about this person and yet I know her innermost thoughts; that she made herself fall in love with a cripple because he was the only one who would never abandon her.
Fear of abandonment.
I know all about that.
The fear of abandonment.
The fear of being abandoned meant
That in the end you would die alone. This is what Jane feared above everything else.
--
I have grown attached to Jane and her fear of abandonment. I carry her diary around with me wherever I go, and take comfort in her growing madness. In her fictional relationships with men named Al and Ken. I am filled with contempt at her mother and father, who remind me so much of my own when I was a child.
Sometimes, on the subway, when I see a woman in her fifties, someone who looks slightly lost and deranged, the New York state of mind, I wonder if it's Jane. But Jane probably committed suicide. The therapy bills and her inability to improve her mental health probably got the better of her. That's why her diary was lying in a box of abandoned books in Park Slope, along with Milton and Mann and Kerouac.
She was a failed painter. She was a tragedy. I know nothing about this person and yet I know her innermost thoughts; that she made herself fall in love with a cripple because he was the only one who would never abandon her.
Fear of abandonment.
I know all about that.
The fear of abandonment.
The fear of being abandoned meant
That in the end you would die alone. This is what Jane feared above everything else.
--