Girls are cruelest to themselves.Someone like Emily Brontë,who remained a girl all her life despite her body as a woman,had cruelty drifted up in all the cracks of her like spring snow.

Banal sexism aside,I find myself temptedto read Wuthering Heights as one thick stacked act of revengefor all that life withheld from Emily.But the poetry shows traces of a deeper explanation.As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women.It is a chilly thought.

The basic rules of male-female relationswere imparted atmospherically in our family,no direct speech allowed.

So about an hour later we are in the taxishooting along empty country roads towards town.The April light is clear as an alarm.As we pass them it gives a sudden sense of every objectexisting in space on its own shadow.I wish I could carry this clarity with meinto the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce.I wish I had been nicer to him before he got crazy.These are my two wishes.

My mother always closes her bedroom drapes tight before going to bed at night.I open mine as wide as possible.I like to see everything, I say.What’s there to see?Moon. Air. Sunrise.All that light on your face in the morning. Wakes you up.I like to wake up.