That I want it so much only makes me less lovable, it seems. But--who
knows?--it may be there will be some one.
My anemone lady does not love me. How can she--since she does not
understand me? But she allows me to love her--and that carries me
a long way. There are many--oh, a great many--who will not allow
you to love them if you would.
There is no one to love me now.
Always I wonder how it will be after some long years when I find
myself about to die.
February 7.
In this house where I drag out my accursed, devilish, weary
existence, upstairs in the bathroom, on the little ledge at the
top of the wainscoting, there are six tooth-brushes: an ordinary
white bone-handled one that is my younger brother’s; a white
twisted-handled one that is my sister’s; a flat-handled one that is
my older brother’s; a celluloid-handled one that is my stepfather’s;
a silver-handled one that is mine; and another ordinary one that is
my mother’s. The sight of these tooth-brushes day after day, week
after week, and always, is one of the most crushingly maddening
circumstances in my fool’s life.
Every Friday I wash up the bathroom. Usually I like to do this. I
like the feeling of the water squeezing through my fingers, and
always it leaves my nails beautifully neat. But the obviousness of
those six tooth-brushes signifying me and the five other members of
this family and the aimless emptiness of my existence here--Friday
after Friday--makes my soul weary and my heart sick.
Never does the pitiable, barren, contemptible, damnable, narrow
Nothingness of my life in this house come upon me with so intense
a force as when my eyes happen upon those six tooth-brushes.
Among the horrors of the Inquisition, a minute refinement of cruelty
was reached when the victim’s head was placed beneath a never-ceasing
falling of water, drop by drop.
A convict sentenced to solitary confinement, spending his endless
days staring at four blank walls, feels that had he committed every
known crime he could not possibly deserve his punishment.
I am not undergoing an Inquisition, nor am I a convict in solitary
confinement. But I live in a house with people who affect me mostly
through their tooth-brushes--and those I should like, above all
things, to gather up and pitch out of the bathroom window--and oh,
damn them, _damn_ them!
You who read this, can you understand the depth of bitterness and
hatred that is contained in this for me? Perhaps you can a little
if you are a woman and have felt yourself alone.
When I look at the six tooth-brushes a fierce, lurid storm of rage
and passion comes over me. Two heavy leaden hands lay hold of my
life and press, press, press. They strike the sick, sick weariness
to my inmost soul.
Oh, to leave this house and these people, and this intense
Nothingness--oh, to pass out from them, forever! But where can I go,
what can I do? I feel with mad fury that I am helpless. The grasp
of the stepfather and the mother is contemptible and absurd--but
with the persistence and tenacity of narrow minds. It is like the
two heavy leaden hands. It is not seen--it is not tangible. It is
felt.
Once I took away my own silver-handled tooth-brush from the bathroom
ledge, and kept it in my bedroom for a day or two. I thought to
lessen the effect of the six.