Sunlight-Colored Roses

Those girls in my shadow-world feel like my kindred. I feel more secure in the real world when I am half in my shadow-world. It’s easier to smile; I feel distant, unconcerned when I feel those other presences nearby.

Josette is one of my long-haired shadow girls, and there are many half-formed girls around her. Sometimes the girls merge together, or shift into different girls.

Today, a lost journal has been on my mind. When we lived at the apartment in Arlington, and I shopped at a nearby Kroger, I left that journal, full of my stories, in the front part of a shopping cart in the parking lot. I wonder what someone who found that journal might have thought if they opened it up. It was about my Asian ball-jointed dolls: Ophelia, Shelley, and my little Caliban, Johnny. In the notes, drawings and fragments of that journal, they lived their true lives, much more so than they did in the novel I finished about them later.

I wish I could return to the world I felt inside those pages. Today, I re-read Lady Anne’s speech from Richard III, which I chose as my recitation in Shakespeare class. Shakespeare has been much on my mind lately. I wish I could act in gold-threaded costumes with my hair streaming, and a phial of pretend-poison at my lips.

When he that is my husband now
Came to me, as I follow’d Henry’s corse,
When scarce the blood was well wash’d from his hands
Which issued from my other angel husband
And that dead saint which then I weeping follow’d;
O, when, I say, I look’d on Richard’s face,
This was my wish: ‘Be thou,’ quoth I, ‘ accursed,
For making me, so young, so old a widow!
And, when thou wed’st, let sorrow haunt thy bed;
And be thy wife—if any be so mad—
As miserable by the life of thee
As thou hast made me by my dear lord’s death!
Lo, ere I can repeat this curse again,
Even in so short a space, my woman’s heart
Grossly grew captive to his honey words
And proved the subject of my own soul’s curse,
Which ever since hath kept my eyes from rest;
For never yet one hour in his bed
Have I enjoy’d the golden dew of sleep,
But have been waked by his timorous dreams.
Besides, he hates me for my father Warwick;
And will, no doubt, shortly be rid of me.