crazy like a loon

"I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."

from The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath is one of my favorite poets. The brilliance of her poetry is blinding in a very unsettling way; it's as if she has caught me naked in the vastness of my parched, cracked desert, sitting spread-eagle, under a cloudlessly hot indigo sky. As I struggle to write a collection of short stories, stories which I hope will eventually become the wellspring of a memoir, I am starting her novel, The Bell Jar, for inspiration. I like to read powerful books, no, I require powerful books, when I need a nudge.

I am new at all this; I haven't a clue what I'm doing. I am writing this memoir because I need to write it; I need an exorcism. Maybe what I write will be shit, I don't know. Or maybe I'll be the next Sylvia Plath.

Sylvia scares me. Which is exactly why I am so enchantingly lured, into her dark and intensely pulsating embrace. I hope that what I read will prod my brain to remember, to feel what I long ago embalmed in the bowels of my soul. I am at a loss to find the memories that have poisoned the very red of my marrow. Perhaps it is too late. Perhaps the demons of my pain have already killed me. Perhaps I will be unable to purge this fetid miasma from my belly. Perhaps I am indeed, nothing more than a still and empty hole in the eye of the tornado that I have created.