I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.

From the night Buddy Willard kissed me and said I must go out with a lot of boys, he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was and that everything he did like hugging and kissing and petting was simply what I made him feel like doing out of the blue, he couldn’t help it and didn’t know how it came about. Now I saw he had only been pretending all this time to be so innocent.

In this particular tub, two knees jut up like icebergs, while minute brown hairs rise on arms and legs in a fringe of kelp; green soap navigates the tidal slosh of seas breaking on legendary beaches; in faith we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

I love the people,' I said. 'I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives.

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.

I want to kill myself, to escape from responsiblity, to crawl abjectly back into the womb.