I went towards the stairs, just as the band was playing ‘Now is the Hour’, and the music reached down like a long spoon inside me and stirred, and stirred.

They think I’m going to be a schoolteacher but I’m going to be a poet.

Life is hell, but there are prizes.

I was baffled by my fuzzy hair and the attention it drew, and the urgency with which people advised that I have it ‘straightened’, as if it posed a threat.

Divisions of the kind were fashionable at that time, and it was so easy to stifle one’s need to help by deciding that help could neither be accepted nor understood.

People do not cry because it is the end. They cry because the end does not correspond with their imagination of it. Their first choice is always their own imagining; they refuse to be deterred by warnings. They say I choose this because although the price is high the thing itself is more precious, durable and beautiful. The light of imagined events is always so arranged that the customers do not see the flaws in what they have chosen to buy with their dreams.

I’m not there, she thought. I’m not there. I’m nowhere. She felt the world go dark with sudden exclusion and she was beating her wings against the door of the dark but no one opened the door; indeed, no one heard.

Ug-g-Ug. Ohhh Ohh g. Ugg.

The fact is, very few of us are real imposters. And it’s different from play-acting. Imposterism or imposture comes from the core of your being because there’s nothing else there. Your central being never develops a self; that’s not a disadvantage, entirely, though you do have to fight for your point of view, almost as if you were dead.

So I went up north to a land of palm trees and mangroves like malignant growths in the mud-filled throats of the bays, and orange trees with their leaves accepting darkly and seriously, in their own house as it were, the unwarranted globular outbursts of winter flame; and the sky faultless and remote.