wondered where I might go. Knew I’d take him with me.
The more the other’s handwriting came with hers—he finishing her letters, his words in her margins, she signing a letter
your own Mary who loves you,
—the more I felt like a ghost. Why had I wondered if she missed my books, the graveyard? How could I have been so foolish?
“A truth wastes away when it becomes integrated into other ones,” I’d read. Had I merely been of use to her until she’d met him? Each mind, the book said, “preserves and suppresses, realizes and destroys.”
Meanwhile I watched their hands moving closely together. Their words intertwined and overlapped. Each following and guiding. The quiet shore of them. Wing-beats. Turnings. Consent.
Often they wrote of a monster, a creature, a feared being. It pained me, but I wasn’t surprised.
Where she wrote,
I sprung on him that I might destroy so hateful a monster,
the other wrote above those words then continued in the left-hand margin:
and impelled by all the feelings which can arm one being against the existence of another
Where she wrote,
A creature whom I myself had created and endued with life,
he crossed out
creature
wrote in:
being.
She wrote,
I lived in daily fear lest the monster whom I had created should perpetuate some new wickedness. I had an obscure feeling that all was not over
and he added,
there was always fear so long as anything I loved remained alive.
His hand so often in the margins:
distrusting the very solace
and
lulled
and then,
my disorder owed its origin to some uncommon & terrible event
When she wrote fast she left out letters:
remeber for remember
—his hand inserted the
m.
The more I watched, the more I felt alone. Still, I didn’t want them to stop. Feared one day her hand would leave forever.
William, I see you and the children eating breakfast—Or they’re outside in the evening fighting and playing—Sometimes I see my hand writing, “the unswervable principles of justice and humanity,” something like that, or “send me some ink,” or “I’m glad there’s no perhaps”—I see Goethe’s book we were reading. Words I underlined but can’t remember why: mortal, selfishness, traffic, impulse, flies, great, little. Why underline those above others?—I hear your voice say “it’s cloudy”—Then you’re telling Dr. Clarke you won’t attend my funeral—I see moths, candles, a horse running away from you (though that’s something I never really saw), Fanny Blood in fever, my father hitting my mother on the stair—I hear the black doors of the Thames, their hinges—My hand writes, must learn to brave censure, “I’m not fond of vindications, “Fanny sends her love to Henry”—I watch all these words brightening, fading— I can’t tell if I have skin or has it vanished? How vivid everything is now that it’s leaving—The trees’ soft pulsings, Joseph Johnson’s kindness to me, Fanny Blood’s botanical drawings—
Not once did she change because I thought of her or watched her. What would I have changed? Her love of him, her blindness toward me and toward herself, our days in the graveyard, her rage at what she thought I was?
When flowers open they’re said to “watch.” My watching had little openness in it.
I was “vigil-strange,” “vigil-wasted,” “vigil-patient,” “vigil-keeping,” “vigil-blind.”
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But I was not confined to my own identity—
she’d written that in air. So how could I have found her? How could I find her even now?
Claire,
Why couldn’t I forget him? Not even after those beginning secret hours with Shelley, our love for each other, our thoughts of running away. When Shelley gave me Queen Mab, I pretended I was reading to a girl on the other side of the bushes in a graveyard. Or I’d sit in my room wondering what he’d think of the tiny printed hands in the margins of Shelley’s notes. Those notes reminded me of how he wandered through so many texts, surprising me—I never knew what would come next. I felt a sudden softening in myself as I thought this, the laboratory far from my mind, the idea of him strapped to the table much too far from my mind. So I pulled back, strapped him to the table once again, took away his mouth, his tongue, sometimes took away a hand, a leg, made sure he