Novel C
The rest is posthumous. – Ted Hughes, 1963
1953
Why did it have to be this summer? This summer, oh God? When they burnt the Rosenbergs alive in their shells and the crust was more life than I knew or would know.
I can’t be this iron colossus I’m expected to be. This endless, shapeless being devoid of emotions but motherhood and chastity. Starless and fatherless, my heaven waits ahead.
I made another attempt at life that year. They never ended. They moved on forever. Most make attempts at death, but I’m certain mine shall be an attempt at life. If there is anything in the world, it doesn’t reside in this universe.
All morning the morning had been blackening in mourning, and I slipped, delicate and ivory into the American dream, the warm bath in winter with the razor which defined me. My only friend, that which removed my natural hair and preserved me as the figurehead of conformity. But I must. I must shave every area to make myself beautiful. Supposedly so men may love me, but I hold no interest in contorting my body into the American dream, sick and unrecovering.
That razor blade, that overcast morning, gave me the near-substantial (which is more than I can wish for) relief of entering the glorious realm beyond life and death.
Until, that is, I was found. My ‘friends’ who would not let me have the only thing I wanted pulled me out that bathtub, wiped the blood from what they called my life and body and threw me back into that hell, my broken body the nine dark Alps I had never seen since I cried myself blind in childhood over the years I would never have.
These ‘friends’ I had never truly seen in all their viciousness. What sane creature demands the impossible of a corpse?
And threaten to let me through to a heaven when all I desire is hell? No I, though I am hardly appropriate for the role, I demand the perfect bliss of endless nothingness. If there is an afterlife, I shall be disappointed in the knowledge that my completion will never be done.
Like the cat I have nine times to die. I wish death upon myself endlessly, yet still it never will arrive. I am trapped in this body I could not want.’
Dying is an art like everything else. Perhaps I should embrace it and work on my technique. This was a way to explore my depression. Literature could be my vice.
Perhaps it would be my way to develop a new art. Writing could be my full art. I could die in my writing.
Aurelia, come back to me. Recover my body from the wreck of my life and throw it away to the sea, so the high heavens may see me drown in one eternal exit.
1954
This is the year when I begin to get better. I have resolved that depression is simply not worth it.
Obviously, I never meant to be depressed. Obviously, I want happiness. But my suicide attempts can never happen again. Not if I could have a happy life. Not if I can have a happy life.
I know nothing about who I am or where I’m going. I know only that I am alive and will stay that way.