Yesterday Carries Tomorrow

I've never felt true shame about who I was until I found this place. Every facet of my being feels wrong... hollow... obsolete?

Interesting how I felt those little negative thoughts begin to nest in my heart and yet still could do nothing to stop them.

Here, I feel crazy, weak. For here, if you have all you need why would you complain?

My skin is paper thin. Please teach it how to grow.

I want to cease this nonsense.

Excerpt from Tulips by: Sylvia Plath

"I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

How free it is, you have no idea how free -

The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,

And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.

It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them

Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.

Before they came the air was calm enough,

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.

Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe

Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.

Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down

Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,

A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me

Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow

Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,

And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself

The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.

Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.

Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river

Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.

They concentrate my attention, that was happy

Playing and resting without committing itself.

The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;

They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,

And comes from a country far away as health."