The Story of Mary MacLane/April 12
OH, THE dreariness, the Nothingness!
Day after day—week after week,—it is dull and gray and weary. It is dull, dull, DULL!
No one loves me the least in the world.
"My life is dreary—he cometh not."
I am unhappy—unhappy.
It rains. The blue sky is weeping. But it is not weeping because I am unhappy.
I hate the blue sky, and the rain, and the wet ground, and everything. This morning I walked far away over the sand, and these things made me think they loved me—and that I loved them. But they fooled me. Everything fools me. I am a fool.
No one loves me. There are people here. But no one loves me—no one understands—no one cares.
It is I and the barrenness. It is I—young and all alone.
Pitiful Heaven!—but no, Heaven is not pitiful.
Heaven also has fooled me, more than once.
There is something for every one that I have ever known—some tender thing. But what is there for me? What have I to remember out of the long years?
The blue sky is weeping, but not for me. The rain is persistent and heavy as damnation. It falls on my mind and it maddens my mind. It falls on my soul and it hurts my soul.—Everything hurts my soul.—It falls on my heart and it warps the wood in my heart.
Of womankind and nineteen years, a philosopher of the peripatetic school, a thief, a genius, a liar, and a fool—and unhappy, and filled with anguish and hopeless despair. What is my life? Oh, what is there for me!
There has always been Nothing. There will always be Nothing.
There was a miserable, damnable, wretched, lonely childhood. Itself has passed, but the pain of it has not passed. The pain of it is with me and is added to the pain of now. It is pain that never lets itself be forgotten. The pain of the childhood was the pain of Nothing. The pain of now is the pain of Nothing. Oh, the pathetic burlesque-tragedy of Nothing!
It is burlesque, but it is none the less tragedy. It is tragedy that eats its way inward.
It is only I and the sand and barrenness.
I have never a tender thing in my life. The sand and barrenness has never a grass-blade.
I want a human being to love me. I have need of it. I am starving to death for lack of it.
Bitterest salt tears surge upward—sobs are shaking themselves out from the depths. Oh, the salt is bitter. I might lay me down and weep all day and all night—and the salt would grow more bitter and more bitter.
But life in its Nothingness is more bitter still.
It is burlesque-tragedy that is the most tragic of all.
It is an inward dying that never ends. It is the bitterness of death added to the bitterness of life.
What hell is there like that of one weak little human being placed on the earth—and left alone?
There are people who live and enjoy. But my soul and I—we find life too bitter, and too heavy to carry alone. Too bitter, and too heavy.
Oh, that I and my soul might perish at this moment, forever!