Jane Pattison

“A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.
                “We’ll take up where we left off, Esther,” she had said, with her sweet, martyr’s smile. “We’ll act as if all this were a bad dream.”
                A bad dream.
                To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
                A bad dream.
                I remembered everything.
                I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marco’s diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon’s wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a gray skull.
                Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.
                But they were part of me. They were my landscape.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar