▪ She Had Nobody to Tell

"I am going to walk to the fountain and back," she said.

For she could stand it no longer. Dr. Holmes might say there was nothing the matter. Far rather would she that he were dead! She could not sit beside him when he stared so and did not see her and made everything terrible; sky and tree, children playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, falling down; all were terrible. And he would not kill himself; and she could tell no one. "Septimus has been working too hard"—that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody, not even Septimus now, and looking back, she saw him sitting in his shabby overcoat alone, on the seat, hunched up, staring. And it was cowardly for a man to say he would kill himself, but Septimus had fought; he was brave; he was not Septimus now. She put on her lace collar. She put on her new hat and he never noticed; and he was happy without her. Nothing could make her happy without him! Nothing! He was selfish. So men are. For he was not ill. Dr. Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him. She spread her hand before her. Look! Her wedding ring slipped—she had grown so thin. It was she who suffered—but she had nobody to tell.

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

▪ When I Read, I Become Plural

MULTIPLICITY

I like it how I can be different mes at the same time. Today I was me in three different ways. All very different. At the same time. I was me reading her, Mrs. Dalloway. So focused. So absorbed. And then I stopped reading, looked up and talked to my mum and dad and I was me, their son. Completely different. Pure and amusing. And then I resumed my reading and I was with her again, in silence. And I read her, and I learnt her. And then I stopped reading one passage or another and I stood up and I was me, transformed, manifold. (And where the hell had time gone?) The after-reading me, so different, so full, so subtle, so sensible, so her, Mrs. Dalloway, so me, so us, so fused together.

Three times me. Many times me. And all of a sudden they? we? are one again, indivisible. A duplicated past. A different present. A richer self. A plural me.

(2010)