wasabi

Cats have nine lives, the saying goes. You have one; and somewhere along the thin, tenuous thread of your existence there is the black knot, the blood clot, the stopped heartbeat that spells the end of this particular individual which is spelled "I" and "You" and "Sylvia." So you wonder how to act, and how to be - and you wonder about values and attitudes. In the relativism and despair, in the waiting for the bombs to begin, for the blood (now spurting in Korea, in Germany, In Russia) to flow and trickle before your own eyes, you wonder with a quick sick fear how to cling to earth, to the seeds of grass and life. You wonder about your eighteen years, ricocheting between a stubborn determination that you've done well for your own capabilities and opportunities ...and a fear that your haven't done well enough. You wonder if you've got what it takes to keep building up obstacle courses for yourself, and to keep leaping through them, sprained ankle or not. Again, the refrain, what have you for your eighteen years? And you know that whatever tangible things you do have they cannot be held, but, too, will decompose and slip away through your coarse skinned and death-rigid fingers. So you will rot in the ground, and so you say, who cares? But you care, and somehow you don't want to live just one life, which could be tossed off in a thumbnail sketch: "She was the sort of girl..." And end in 25 words or less. You want to live as many lives as you can...

-Plath

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