The Unabriged Journals of Sylvia Plath:
22 November 1955 - 18 April 1956
I read his letter and walked the wet pine-dark path tonight, with the warm rain dripping and shiny on the black leaves in the humid blurred starlight, crying and crying with this terrible pain; it hurts, father, it hurts, oh father I have never known, a father, even, they took from me.
It all sounds so simple and ridiculous: I found out today that I am deeply and for-god-knows-how-long in love with a boy who will not let me come to him out of a ferocious cold scrupulosity and not only will not let me come, when it is possible, but is going this spring away to where it will be for infinite years impossible. And he will not let me come.
And I think of that magnificent poem by James Joyce “I hear an army charging upon the land” … and the final irrevocable lines which after that dynamic thunder of horses and whirling laughter and long green hair coming out of the sea, there is the simple series of words with all the anguish in the world:
“My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?”
If I were a man, I could write a novel about this; being a woman, why must I only cry and freeze, cry and freeze?
Let me be strong, strong with sleep and strong with intelligence and strong with bone and fibre; let me learn, through this desperation, to spread myself out: to know where and to whom to give: to Nat, to Gary, to Chris even, to Iko, to dear Gordon in his way: to give the small moments and the casual talk that very special infusion of devotion and love which make our epiphanies. Not to be bitter. Save me from that, that final wry sour lemon acid in the veins of single clever lonely women.
Let me not be desperate and throw away my honor for want of solace, let me not hide in drinking and lacerating myself on strange men; let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips; and gathers, and congeals. I am still young. Even twenty-three and a half is not to late to live anew.
