Male friendship -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
From now on, she went about with it. While she worked or played--seldom
this was--and went through the grimacings of a social creature; while
she slept--there it was ever upon her breast: that David must be saved!
He had not come to see her.
She said to herself: it is no matter. To have seen him would have been
joy, or rather ecstasy so packed she could for many days have had her
joy of it. It was no matter. For she had no plan. What would she say to
him, or do, when he came? Let him stay away until she was more ready. It
was bitter to know he had not come, and she expecting him. It was no
matter.
Her sleep was a strange thing. No real dreams--streakings of thought and
dream ran through her night like falling flames. So that her night was
neither sleep nor waking. It was an endless trembling between two
worlds, it was a part of Chaos. She lay there and her body was a
restless weight holding her down. She was like a little boat tossed at
anchor by a broken sea. Her body and her consciousness: these were the
anchor. They kept her from running wild with the waves. And the waves
kept her from being quiet at her anchor. She was torn. She was a
continuous play of hindered movement.
When the day came, she lay there wearied as if she had been swept by a
great fury.
Her nights were streaked by these running ribbons of dream: and always
they were the same insofar as always they were really nothing. They were
David. Her problems in David. Her plans and her helplessness to solve
them. Never, even in her sleep, did she sink to some quiet haven of
dream with David: have him there to talk to gently, to be with gladly.
Something surging within her took this great Wish and cut it up into
bloody fragments and strewed her night with them. All of David was never
there: nor all of a single moment with her holding his head on her
breast. David’s laughter or David’s troubled frown or David’s voice: or
merely David’s name--David, David, David--falling down her night like
drippings of blood. And she, lost in this welter of struggle between
wish and the real, unable to take sides.
There was no rest in such nights. She lay in her narrow bed, cast up in
her cell-like room as upon some rocky shore. And looking back upon her
sleep, she had a sense of a delirious underworld, yellow of hue with
veins of livid red wriggling athwart it, and of herself who followed the
veins. It was a shattered and scattered self that had been thrown
through the night, thrown, somehow intact, upon the shore of the
morning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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