(no subject)
I am a whisper in a great hall. I can make people turn their heads.
I can echo.
I have sharpened my tools and treat them with care for they are new to me. I do not take them for granted. Voice. Audience. They are a gift. I know this.
There is power when a woman speaks about herself. Thinks about herself. That power must be used carefully for it can lead us into depths to which we were never meant to sink. Beware lest you fall where others have fallen before--it can even happen in your kitchen. May she rest in peace.
Hymns have been sung in my honor, and I have been the muse of plays and sonnets and love songs, and my story has been told for generations, but no one has ever been true to me. I try to fool myself and say that this is the reason why I write, to set the record straight, but that is not true. I write because I must. It drives me. I can be silent no more.
I have never really been silent. I have called myself by other names, but that is not the same. I deny myself even when just signing another name to my work. I speak falsely. I say things I oughtn't and wouldn't if I had to carry them myself into the light of day.
Father, forgive me for I have sinned. I have never been to confession.
*****
A true narrative begins with birth.
Holden choses to gloss that part over because he thinks that it doesn't matter. "All people start out the same--innocent like my sister," he used to say. We debate this often, and we never get anywhere. He always gets all in a huff and tells me that I'm a phony and stomps off.
Sometimes I think that he's in denial of the fact that all of us here are just figments of someone's imagination. Sometimes I wonder if pieces of Holden have flown from this world into the world of the living, and they travel around with all who have brushed by him like ticks on a dog. The thought makes me shiver, for if it happens to him, it could happen to me, and the thought of me staying with a person forever is frightening. What if they just wish I would go away, and I wasn't there to call myself back? What if his pieces and mine found themselves next to each other in the world of the living, how could we completely fight with only a piece of us there?
I was born in Enga. My father was the mayor. Now, I shouldn't have said that because your immediate impression of my father is that he's like the fat mayor from The Wizard of Oz with an orange face and fake smile. On second thought, that isn't all that far from the truth--especially, when he's been out in the sun too long.
Mayors don't do anything overly important. Their job is to look important, make everyone think that everything is under control. They're kind of like a mascot. Sometimes I think, even Lenny could have done it, if he'd just have put down that stupid mouse. May he rest in peace.
This is interesting. She's writing about fiction characters from books like she knows them. Holden, of course, is Catcher in the Rye, and Lenny is from Of Mice and Men. The woman in the kitchen is Sylvia Plath. She might as well be a character in a book. She made herself one. I can't wait to see where this rabbit trail goes.