something else, something like “slash this, slash that”—that this is what thinking is and there are so many sharp edges in me now, so many cuts and gashes overall. And I can’t anyhow
sky, precipices (I see my own weakness) nevermind
the
and that I will never be able to
I remember after Mary ran away and you weren’t permitted to see her she sent you a lock of her hair and you kept it in your drawer. It’s late now. Why do I still write to you though I know you’re no longer alive? Is it my way of slowly getting used to your not being here? Or am I delaying the idea that you’re not here? The blunt fact of it. (I don’t pretend we were even close.) Your hard, skinny body, your bones. The away in you, in anyone. The apart.
Nights I lie awake imagining chromosomes breaking inside me, suddenly estranged from what they were. Insurgencies, counterinsurgencies of thought. Scorchings. Retaliations.
I remember the notes you left behind. How they went over every step you took to make me, the discarded parts you collected from the graveyard, even the fevers you suffered as you built me.
I keep those notes in my knapsack, though I wish never to look at them again.
Months now since I’ve seen a human face.
“And he who studies himself will find in himself much discordance.”
Fanny,
Mary visited today. She brought a few pages she found in your drawer (Godwin finally allowed her back into the house). I wouldn’t have thought this of you, that you kept notes, made sketches. Even just a few. No one knows but Mary and me. Not even Shelley. In this one, here, the pencil line’s so faint I can barely make out your shoulders’ slope, your head with the face turned away. Why did you make the face turned away? The paper’s so small, barely 2” square. As if you were already disappearing … Maybe time’s different from what we think and we get only glimpses, we think it moves forward but it doesn’t, just allows us in at different places. Maybe there’s no continuity of space or time after all. So where are you then, and why? You with your face turned away. These faint traces you left that say however softly: I was here. Which is different from: am known.
This, too, Fanny, you left behind:
August 1, 1816
Mr. Booth says it’s peace that has brought calamity upon us. But what hope is there if Peace is Calamity? The foreign ports are shut, manufacturing drastically cut back. Millions left to starve. That’s what he says. He says 26,000 men are unemployed in Shropshire. Workers drag coals in immense wagons without horses all the way to London and are turned back. So they give the coals for nothing to the poor. Mr. Owen says he has a plan, but how can he expect the rich to give up their possessions and live in a state of equality with others—this is too romantic to be believed. His plan says that “no human being shall work more than two or three hours every day; that they shall all be equal; that no one shall dress but after the plainest and simplest manner, that their slaves shall be Mechanics and Chemistry.” But why does he use the word “slaves”? I wish I were not a dependent being in every sense of the word. Claire and Mary and Shelley all far away. Why am I always so affraid? And Godwin always worried about money. I know Mary used to sit near our mother’s grave—but I could never do that. Too affraid of what I’d feel there. Mary writes and asks about what old friends I’m seeing, but I see no one. When I look at the page my eyes blur though the doctor says it’s not my eyes but my mind. So cold since Mt. Tamboro erupted. What I write I write to no one.
And this:
August 7, 1816
A watch and some books arrived today from Mary. I’m not used to this kindness. I would like to visit Venice and Naples one day. And finally, this (no more papers left in your drawer): 5 a.m., Sept. 9, 1816
I record here my dream: Mary was visiting, and Clare. Someone was complaining that vials of poison had been scattered on the moor, that this should be looked into. Then we were all in a room with many large machines. Soon we each lay on a bed by a machine. The machines seemed to