Stop & ask why you wash, why you dress, you go wild - it is as if love, pleasure, opportunity surrounded me, and I were blind. I talk hysterically - or feel I will explode: I am in a fix: how to get out of it? Some little daily external ritual - I am too ingrown -

The responsibility of my future weighs, terrifies. Why should it? Why can't I be pragmatic, common? At the end of a teaching day, no matter the reversals, I had earned ten dollars motive enough, in many minds. I need a vocation & to feel productive & I feel useless. Ignorant.

My odd publications here & there argue writing is no vain dream, but a provable talent - I am in a vicious circle - too much alone, with no fresh exterior experiences except the walking around, about, staring at people who seem, simply because they are other, to be enviable...

September 15: Brag of bravado, & the fear is on. A panic, absolute & obliterating: here all diaries end - the vines on the brick wall opposite end in a branch like a bent green snake. Names, words, are power. I am afraid. Of what? Life without having lived, chiefly.

I see beginnings, flashes, yet how to organize them knowledgably, to finish them. I will write mad stories. But honest. I know the horror of primal feelings, obsessions.

It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain... remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted. When you feel that this may be the good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder.

"I could love you violently, if I let myself."

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.

Thursday: September II: A pleasant day - clear, blue, early on, and magnificently fresh. Clouding over later, with a wicked wind. Yesterday was lost in a fog of pain, cramps, curses & dopeysickness from too much useless bufferin.

I am feeling depressed from being exposed to so many lives, so many of them exciting, new to my realm of experience. I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me.

Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul.

Spring is in the pink and lavendar paint stains on the floor; in the pink and orange neck of the girl in front of me; in the crooked part in her yellow hair...

There is history to read - centuries to comprehend before I sleep, millions of lives to assimilate before breakfast tomorrow.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough.

Wait till June. June? I shall fall rust-tongued long before then. Somehow, to write poems, I need all my time forever ahead of me - no meals to get, no books to prepare.

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream.

I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.

dark, liquid loveliness of words half dimly understood.

So I perversely circle the late stars, drowsier and drowsier, sleepily longing for something - - - - - nothing - talking, working, eating, wondering always who am I? Who is this girl I hear talking?

I want to stay awake for the next three days and nights, drawing the threads of my summer cocoon neatly about me and snipping all the loose ends: to savor until the dying of the last wave, the last dawn, this place, the leaving of which means leaving a great space of living...

Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.

I am feeling depressed from being exposed to so many lives, so many of them exciting, new to my realm of experience. I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough.

love life day by day, color by color, touch by touch, because you've got a body & mind to exercise, and that is your lot, to exercise & use it as much as you can, never mind whose got a better or worse body & mind, but stretch yours as far as you can.

Love is an illusion, but I would willingly fall for it if I could believe in it. Now everything seems either far and sad and cold, like a piece of shale at the bottom of a canyon - or warm and near and unthinking, like the pink dogwood.

I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love. I am still so naive; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?