A Dead womans Dairies
“This is who I am, Julian.” I try to keep my breathing even, try to sound like a king. The words make sense as I think them, but they come out wrong. Stumbling, unsure. “It’s everything I’ve ever known, the only path I’ve ever wanted or been made to want.”
My uncle tightens his grip on my shoulders. “Your brother could say the same, and where did that lead him?”
I bristle at that, glaring at him. “We’re not the same.”
“No, you aren’t,” he replies hastily. Then his attitude changes, a strange look coming over him. Julian narrows his eyes, lips pressing into a thin, grim line. “You haven’t read the diary, have you?”
Again I drop my gaze. Ashamed of how afraid I am of a simple, small book. “I don’t think I can,” I whisper, barely audible.
Julian offers no quarter, no comfort. He stands back, crossing his arms. He doesn’t need many words to scold me.
“Well, you need to,” he says simply, taking on the air of a teacher again. “Not just for yourself. But for the rest of us. All of us.”
“I don’t see how the diary of a dead woman can be any help right now.”
“Well, hopefully you summon the courage to find out.”
Reading it feels like pushing a stone through mud. Sluggish, difficult, foolish. The words pull at me with inky fingers, trying to hold me back. Each page is heavier than the last. Until they aren’t. Until the stone is rolling down a hill, and the voice I give my mother rings in my head, speaking as quickly as my mind allows. Sometimes my eyes blur. I don’t stop to wipe the tears from the pages, letting them mark the hours as the night passes. Sometimes I find myself smiling. My mother liked to tinker with things. Repair and build. Just like me.
Sometimes I even laugh. The way she talks about Julian, their kind rivalry, how he gave her books she would never read. I can
"Kırılmaktan korkmamanın bir yolunun da, kendi kendini bin parçaya ayırmak olduğunu keşfetmemiştim daha."
kırılmaktan korkmamanın bir yolunun da,
kendi kendini bin parçaya ayırmak olduğunu
keşfetmemiştim...
Kırılmaktan korkmamanın bir yolunun da, kendi kendini bin parçaya ayırmak olduğunu keşfetmemiştim daha. Cam bir fanusun içinde korumaya çalışıyordum kendimi. Yanlış geldiğim bir yerde dünya, öyle hissediyordum. Sanki çok güzel bir yere gitmek üzere yola çıkmışım da, sonra gecenin bir yarısı yanlış durakta ini vermişmişim gibi.
Carthage: Reflections of a Martian
Thy expected alien
Am I.
Weird of shade
And doomfire face:
All thy senses
Cry to my
Mourning mysteries
Which yesterday
Were commonplace.
We sit at Sunday breakfast
And I smell the dust of Carthage.
It drowns the spang
Of our automatic toaster.
That strange woman across from me
Smiles, butters two slices.
Her smiles arouses a multitude in me!
Her smile...
Frightens us.
I must look away!
Out the window beside my arm,
Sunglow warms a brick walk.
Grass, a tree, a planting of forsythia.
It is spring.
In the spring...
The earth is covered with dust.
‘So don’t do it,’ said Wang-mu. ‘If you don’t want to be those things, don’t do them.’
He sighed and closed his eyes. ‘If you’re so bright, why haven’t you understood a word I’ve said?’
She did understand, though. ‘What is your will, anyway? Nobody can see it. You don’t hear it thinking. You only know what your will is afterward, when you look back in your life and see what you’ve done.’
‘That’s the most terrible trick he’s played on me,’ said Peter softly, his eyes still closed. ‘I look back on my life and I see only the memories he has imagined for me. He was taken from our family when he was only five. What does he know of me or my life?’
‘He wrote The Hegemon.’
‘That book. Yes, based on Valentine’s memories, as she told them to him. And the public documents of my dazzling career. And of course the few ansible communications between Ender and my own late self before I – he – died. I’m only a few weeks old, yet I know a quotation from Henry IV, Part I. Owen Glendower boasting to Hotspur. Henry Percy. How could I know that? When did I go to school? How long did I lie awake at night, reading old plays until I committed a thousand favorite lines to memory? Did Ender somehow conjure up the whole of his dead brother’s education? All his private thoughts? Ender only knew the real Peter Wiggin for five years. It’s not a real person’s memories I draw on. It’s the memories Ender thinks that I should have.’
