Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

终于有一天，我总算明白，任何时候，任何地方，都有这样的女人在做这样的事情。她们总是厮守在邮箱旁，无休止地等待一两封信的到来。我想象着自己日复一日、年复一年地做着同样的事，直至鬓发开始发灰变白。我想，上帝造我入世绝不是为了让我这样蹉跎岁月。于是我再也不去邮箱边等信。如果存在两种女人，一种穷其一生都在空等虚度，另一种忙忙碌碌从不浪掷光阴在等候上，我当然知道我应该选择做哪一种。即使做第二种女人可能会错失一些东西而毫不自知，它却始终是更优的选择。

我一直在蜕变，周围的一切也随之变化。我相信通过妥善的自我管理和上天的眷顾，我可以跟任何人平起平坐。事实上也确实如此。

问题，唯一的问题，在于我的母亲。须知她才是我费尽周折想要抵达的地方；这么一段漫长文字的旅程，只是要去接近她、触摸她，将她从人群中分离出来，描述她，照亮她，歌颂她，并最终，摆脱她。但我没能实现，她始终在离我太近之处若隐若现，她一贯就是如此。她一贯是这么重，比世界上任何的存在都要重，却又是不明晰的，她的边缘消融了，流逝了。这意味着她已经牢固地依附于我，像以往任何时候一样紧密贴近，拒绝抛弃，而我将负重前行，前行，使用我所能的技巧，践行我所能的手段，始终不变。

Char and Blaikie seemed to her the same kind of animal--tall, light, powerful, with a dangerous luxuriance. They set apart but shone out together. Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.

And I have noticed anyway, everybody must have noticed as we go further into middle age, how shopworn and simple, really, are the disguises, the identities if you like, that people take up.

"You don't realize. You never realize." "You dramatize." "I dramatize!"

I said you don't realize, you never realize, and he said, what do you want me to say?

But I didn't, I was not able fully to protect or expose him, only to flog him with blame, desperate sometimes, feeling I would claw his head open to pour my vision into it, my notion of what had to be understood.

I was really glad I think to get away from him, it was like he was piling presents on me I couldn't get the pleasure of till I considered them alone.

Women should stick together and do not do things like that. I see that now, but didn't then. I never thought of myself as being in any way like her, or coming to the same troubles, ever.

If there were women all through life waiting, and women busy and not waiting, I knew which I had to be.

It was sensible perhaps to stop noticing, to believe that this was still the same world they were living in, with some dreadful but curable aberrations, never to understand how the whole arrangements had altered.

O God doesn't it, you'd break your heart wanting back there.

To me--how sex had seemed apocalyptic.

I believed such changes had taken place because I had grown up and become at home in the world.

Love is not in the least unavoidable, there is a choice made. It is just that it is hard to know when the choice was made, or when, in spite of seeming frivolous, it became irreversible.

It was all like the kind of vision of the world--a fluid, peaceful vision, utterly reassuring--that I used to get when I was drunk.

We both trembled. We barely managed it, being overcome--both of us, both of us--with gratitude, and amazement. The flood of luck, of happiness undeserved, unqualified, nearly unbelieved-in. Tears stood in our eyes. Undeniably. Yes.

I do think of you I suppose as a warm and sentient flood, you wrote one time to me, and I have the normal human concerns with being overwhelmed, which is what floods do.

From the beginning, of course, I knew that this was a dangerous way to live. At any moment the ties may be cut, have been cut, there is no knowing where the failure originated.

How women deceive themselves and uselessly suffer, being exploitable because of the emptiness of their lives and some deep--but indefinable, and not final!--flaw in themselves.

I cry with Martha T. and Emily R. and wonder what possible way they managed to cure themselves. By learning macramé? By deep breathing? I have tried this, I will try anything, but I don't understand how it works.

Before she went to sleep a picture of Clayton came to her mind: she saw him sitting astride the boat, tar-painting, with such concentration, delicacy, absorption.

Shame could choke you. I mean that. Not at the moment when the whole point was to keep safe and get past but later, what quantities of greasy shame, what indigestible bad secrets. The vulnerability which is in itself a shame. We are shamefully made.

When everybody is dead who could have remembered it, then I suppose the fire will be finished with, it will just as if nobody had ever run through that door.

What is there here that is not being told? thought Dorothy.

Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.

all that time of care and confusion that seemed as if it would never end seems as if it never was

"Do you love me, do you love Margaret, do you love us both?" "I don't know."

If we make jokes we can all survive. I wonder.