My youth is finished and along with it my bright star, and tears. I stopped thinking of the future.

You know I don’t know when exactly that happened all I know is one morning I woke up and I decided you are not loved, you are not loved. You will never be loved and the universe was laughing at me. There was no navigational system set on course for a husband, there was no solid path to follow to a career, no beautiful journey with challenges and an obstacle course to raise children only images of things, imaginary things like hallucinations, psychotropic medication that soon became not so imaginary and the usual Disney-fare, unicorns, talking mice and fairies and the Cheshire cat of which I speak so often in my short stories and a damned waterfall, David Livingstone’s waterfall, no trajectory, only adrenaline pumping through my veins. Whenever taste and sickness becomes fascinating your physical body begins to smile. Your fake mirror reflection smiles back at you, obsessed with the ethereal being you’ve become. Madness is my addiction. Missing it is my crush, my babysitter, my thin if I had an eating disorder or two. I think it’s sexy. Every day I’m seduced by it. Madness is my truth, my statement, the commentary I am making about the society that I live in today, my mother who is thin, who scolds me because I am not even though I tell her it is because of the psychotropic medication I am taking that makes me stay sane, put together, keeps me grounded but it seems to me she wants me to be high even though I am now healthy. I am fixed and the chemicals in my brain have formed their own social cohesion in their closet. Dopamine has her own shoes. Serotonin has a drawer full of pharmaceutical pamphlets. They’ve learned to be roommates, get along, and give each other motherly or hell sisterly advice. All I know is that they’ve got it into their brains sometimes to talk about me and my weight.

I don’t go anywhere about the weight theory. I don’t entertain it. There’s too many conspiracies about that out there. For a long time I thought thin was good, easy, effortless but now I just think it is just a sick mentality. Women come in all shapes and sizes. They’re good mothers, lovers, career women, filmmakers, photographers and take pleasure in everything that they do but they do not experience highs and lows. They do not crumble under pressure. My sister is a photographer. I just thought I’d put that in there. Skinny-sister, kohl-rimmed, peacock-eyes who spends her weekends in galleries or at dinner parties. A life, a life, a life. One must amuse one self.

There might be a leap of faith, but you can never forget about the madness but how can I forget about drowning, falling half-asleep in warm bathwater after I have taken my sleeping pills. I want someone to tell me that they have done those kinds of things too.

I am falling, falling, falling and oh it is so intoxicating and who is to blame for that. Even in therapy I do not talk about my promiscuity. My other-life in another life. There’s a shift that I cannot fix. The men protected me, said I had integrity but the women had eyes like slits, bits in the workplace and they all reminded me of my mother. They stripped me of everything. How daunting it was to be nineteen. To be twenty and sinking into madness, into despair, only finding hope in books and not to have found love yet, yet always the absence of it. Of course my expectations of finding love never grew. I had known what to expect from an early age. I grew up with it. My father worshiped me and I worshiped him (it was pure, it didn’t come with drama even though perhaps in the end it was only an illusion) and I would find that out all through my life you’d get dropped fast if you did not give in to the physical love. I had convinced myself as a young child that my parents were not made for each other. Instead they were all wrong for each other and they were not soul mates fated to be together in sickness and in health till death do us part. Young, old, young-at-heart, divorced with children, single flying solo so how could I ever forget not being the daughter who was adored, who was adorable, who brought home impressive merits one after the other, success after success, the scholarship girl, the Maths genius who went to space camp and worked in New York to pay her university tuition. I have forgot how to shine unfortunately (at thirty-four can a girl still shine, no, she should be having babies, her wedding dress wrapped away delicately in tissue paper). I have forgotten how to illuminate, to blur reality, to blur the normal until it feels like snow, winter settling, filling, being driven, channelled, wedged into the sides of a lake, feeling your way into this world as the interloper, always the Outsider, the loner and not feeling that that is the weirdest part of all. I don’t dream anymore and people who have died, crossed over they visit me in my dreams and ask me after staring at me (poor brilliant girl are you still sick, what happened to all your fierce intelligence and potential when you were fourteen years old in high school) for the longest time, ‘Do you remember me?’ and I say in return. ‘Yes, yes, of course I do. You were my English teacher who died of pancreatic cancer before your time or you were diabetic, alcoholic, pill popping aunt who died before your time. You were my favourite teacher. You were my favourite aunt, my second mother and now you’ve gone dead on me.’ I wish you both were still here. Unfortunately I am still sick but nobody really seems to understand what is wrong with me when my sister seems to have the perfect life. Hatred, I will never let her go. I will never surrender her, clever girl.

What does it matter if I am a stupid girl or a clever girl? Mourning is destructive. Morning is sabotage set loose. Dreamlike, slow, metaphysical braiding the soul with the spirit, a broken self-portrait.

And what do you remember about our childhood I ask my soul and it replies nonchalantly. I want to, need to, desire to remember nothing.

The abnormal, what does that mean? Why, why do we use our heart as a weapon? My mother’s tears come to me in angelic dreams. Is this all that she had hoped for me? Misery and failure. The wolves at the door.

I am bleeding. Space. Exile. History. Nerves. Fatigue. I give it room to breathe. It is the only thing that makes me feel as if I am a woman now. Mothers and daughters must talk about these kind of things, bond over them but we never did. Insanity isn’t it?

What my mother taught me about female poets is that their words were like bows, arrows, apples wasting, falling in heaps and that a child’s eyes can see everything. Vanessa Woolf, my veil, and my apprentice. I will caution you as Achilles was cautioned. As I’m sure Virginia an incest survivor and victim of sexual violence will tell you.

I am growing old. I am growing older. Who will be my mummy then, make me tea, and see that I get out of bed, open my curtains. I believe that she thinks I have always been a threat to her. She is killing me. Her knives are sharp.

The great thing about childhood and two sisters (hating you hating me) sharing a mother, a father and a brother are that there are outgoing scars, there are wounds, that the material that they are made up of is luminous but that there is also a haunting sensation of death and there you will find an honesty open and truthful, perhaps dazed and adventures that will always lay scattered before me, before us as a family. Salvage it as a stamp, an axed scrap or splinter, an album that you page through with trembling fingers looking at dark wonder after dark wonder and one day you know it will be destroyed. Observe the comic. There is both comedy and tragedy in it. Observe the bird, its agony and often its own attempted-suicide as it falls from the nest. Sacrifice is totally unsexy.

I began to fly, see things in a different light once I reached out to books. Marvellous, wonderful things that made up for my childhood and my mother forgetting me, for her to see that I was simply non-existent in her eyes. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in my eyes became the beet king and queen to me perched on their earth-thrones. She was both a mother and an older sister to me. Don’t talk to me about dysfunctional families. Every family is dysfunctional in their own way. Don’t talk to me about cruelty to animals. All human beings are animals. They‘re barbaric. Tears are simply water. Believe me they can be wiped away. They shouldn’t define who you are, or your pain.

By this time it is winter. I hate love. Always have. Ever since I was a child. Don’t touch me. I would think. Don’t kiss me to say hello. Abuse can do that to you. Estrange you from people, your immediate family, and the common people. The only thing I love is madness. It’s Hollywood to me it really is. A bright light city. You have to be so careful letting people in to see the real you, trusting people and even as you are reading this I am hating you too. Look it just comes with the territory, the district. I cannot trust anyone. Mummy you really hurt me. Remember that. I need to know what humanity up close and personal really means. I was never taught what it was. Human rights were always hip during apartheid, post-apartheid, the African Renaissance, for our Rainbow children (I’d rather grieve than say Rainbow Nation). But what on earth were they? I knew as a child mine were always denied or was I simply living in a state of denial.

I could not have wished for better rejection letters. ‘You write with such energy, variety but we cannot publish this.’ Oh that one I remember with wit, it had tasted like spit before it had tasted like honey, milk, butter cookies but also bitterness and hurt. I took it quite personally. Reject. I felt that that word was illegal. Simply put. My mother constantly reminded me it was just a label. It was just as storm in a teacup. My sister smiled as if it had made her happy, joyful but already I had suffered an early death. I knew what the words suffering and sorrow meant. I also thought the rejection of my poetry and haiku was political. My guess the proverb of a skeleton.

‘I enjoyed reading this but unfortunately it will not be placed first.’ They liked it. They liked it. I was overcome, overwhelmed, felt jubilant. But still nothing was good enough. I learned to hate women by hating my emotional, my elegant, and my beautiful mother and I became another version of her but of course I was not vigilant of this in youth. Adolescence, how I miss it. Living in borrowed ignorance. I really am an orphan.

This soft, erotic woman with the strength of a man in her arms, and in her tennis legs, her beautiful white teeth biting into the soft yellow sunny-side up of a fried egg while I watched her and shrieked at her where was my own breakfast while she would just smile, her Mona Lisa smile. She was my Trojan horse, my little shop of horrors, my cancer years, my addiction for all of my life and so her pain became my illustrious pain, her struggles became my own, her burning winter became my project and soon I was the anonymous ghost-child who was a flower in the attic turned into a thief. My sensual-flawed-mother, exotic-smother over her only son.

My sister was happy. She thought she made the right life choices. Perfect doll-child. Perfect adult wearing the perfect shoes, undergarments made of lace, the daughter who is not part of me, the winter guest (I say this in all of my short stories to remain anonymous but there I am a rag doll like M. Night Shyamalan in all of his films) There I am in my little cute box, wooden, not flesh, not blood, not made of skin only violently curious (thinking I am a branch. I am a tree. I am a leaf. I am a stem. I obey. I am Whitman’s grass. I am the weather girl. We’re anticipating clouds today.) She wants no part of me, no portion because perhaps there is meat-to-my-bones.

I seldom worship God. I seldom wonder why that is.

Journal entry

It is early days yet. I need proof. Will a village life be enough for us? I am planting the unsaid. The ground, the earth is fertile for the unsaid. I am planting my future delight, my afternoon delight. I’m trembling healer. There is no childhood for me anymore. Tell me a story Ted Hughes. Write me a poem. It doesn’t have to be romantic. Gaze at me. I will watch you while you sleep, while you work. Smile but to smile it has become an issue between us like malignant syrup. We are not just a marriage of two like-minded individuals but two souls. I cannot change what does not move me, what I do not desire, what I do not need. I am your apprentice and you are the master of this household who lifts the veil of my great loneliness, my attractive mask, my costume. I know that you think of my image as sensual. I cannot give that up. I too have a place in this world. Pull up a chair and sit at my kitchen table and eat. Eat this German Jewess’s food, her recipe for seeds and shoots and wings and things. Eat my chicken. Drink from the glass of water I bring you now. I feel useful now. If you want me to peel the potatoes then I will peel the potatoes.

More killing. It is a mystery. Love is like that. Pure with all of its rituals it holds us in a death-grip and I warm to it, my heart warms to it, warms to you Ted. I am blinded by love, by my passionate rival, my nemesis, her unreason. Gaze at me, I am all starry-eyed. I am all yours. When I fall asleep you are there, when I wake you are there, articulate you and I know we are coming to the edge of a precipice when decisions, hardened choices will have to be made. I know you will leave your Sylvia. I know we will go to Spain. This is inevitable. We will both say goodbye to her echo. The echo of the past, the echo of adultery.

Sylvia is just a dead spot now, but who knew that she would shortly become a stain multiplying, multiplying, and multiplying like rain. I am farming and you are a nomad. I will prepare the house for us to live in, look after the children, cook, clean, prepare the meals, set the table with the proper shiny knives, forks and glasses feed the children, teach them German, play with them as if they were my own. You are my dream. I am your dream. In your own words, ‘I am and always will be your exotic Assia.’ We will prosper. We will build gods in this ghost house, little Buddha’s, with fragrant oil on our hands we will burn sticks of incense, their perfume will fill the room. I will not harm you.

When I am in your arms your tenderness is like madness. Your lovemaking is like clotting madness too and afterwards I will feel rapture. Pleasure, what pleasures? Oh, it feels as if I have returned from oblivion.

There will be wild Saturday nights, encounters with other poets and their wives, who will you fall in love with next, who will be your next dream. Know this. If I cannot triumph I will not be able to endure.

You will take me in your arms again and again and again when our love is at the wuthering heights of its purest intensity. You will pin me down. You will hold me. I will pin your down. We will laugh. I do not know yet that one day my soul will be dead and you, dear Ted, you the one I love the most in the world, hold dearest will be the cause of it.

We will hold hands. We will go into the woods like children with our blanket and our picnic basket of sandwiches. You will come to me with wildflowers in your hands. We will go to the beach, swim, and bathe in the warm water.

I am smitten. I am half-in-love. You have saved me. You have rescued me from a life half-lived, from Nazi-Germany. I think of our children in school, while they lay sleeping in their beds, half-dreaming, half-comatose, protected against the-evils-of-human-nature. Nobody knew what anorexia was, what anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder was. They didn’t know what to call it way back then.

‘Eat. Eat. Why don’t you eat?’ my sister screamed at me.

All I could eat was salad and wilted lettuce leaves.

There are two sisters.

One observes the world and is governed by quiet rivalry, competition between her peers, the stage. The other lives. I think of my sister’s close circle of friends and how they do not know that she is a danger to herself and to others. I love her. I mourn her now. I am always in mourning for her because I cannot have her. I cannot have her love. Whenever I think of childhood I think of pain, I think of my cutting grief, my sister’s grief and how daily the humanity of my mother and my father had shattered me and my sibling.

My mother was my father’s first lover. But I come to you with regret, lovers past and present, three husbands, discontent but clothed or even in my nakedness you can see the real me. Was I promiscuous? I don’t know what the meaning of that word is. When men sleep with women are they promiscuous? When they take a woman to bed do they feel pity, self-pity, no, little or low self-esteem or anguish? All they feel is the sexual impulse. But I am the woman who is made of a much harder substance. To be significant is difficult. And you are the most significant person that I know, the most famous person that I know of Ted Hughes. My Ted, my Ted, my glorious and infallible Ted.

In childhood my innocence went kaput.

Don’t even look at me I should have said now when I think about it in retrospect. Don’t tell me how sorry you are. You’re evil. You’re pure evil is what you are. Don’t touch me. I know you have been with someone else. I know you have been with another one, another woman. Another one got in the way. Did you touch her the way your touched me? Do you even know what the word intimacy means? Coward! Fool! Cad or do you prefer scoundrel, rat! Get out! Do you even know what those words mean cheat? I carried two babies for you, aborted one but you felt nothing. I tried to recover from that. You’re nothing but a butcher. Was she very thin? Was she very sad, did she have brilliant sayings, a brilliant mind, did you love her conversation inside and out of the bedroom traitor? Did you kiss her neck or did she remind you of your Sylvia? Hit me. Hit me jailer. I know you want to. I should have said all of those things but I didn’t. Something held me back. Perhaps it was something in his eyes and how he refused to make contact with mine. I hated him at that moment. I loved him at that moment too. But all I was thinking about was that it had all been for nothing. The abortion. My son. A son. My daughter. A daughter. My body and a spirit caught between two worlds like a butterfly in a jar, and I had a sensibility that a profound freedom was calling, a thought of what it would take to build a Christ, the vision of a love affair in the eyes of a girl.

The first time I ever slept with a man it was tantamount to rape. But I never told this to anyone. Men were rough creatures and that is a simple truth, not gentle, not nurturing, and not giving, oh they were gentle and nurturing enough and giving to their children, to the light of their world but not to the unseen. I always thought of violence as being something external, something outside of myself not something that I would have to live with, that would enter me, something that I would have to accept if I wanted to have the most serious love of my life in my life. The brilliant and most accomplished poet of his generation Ted Hughes. I try and remember our conversations word for word and I write it down and read it over and over again. The goal is to get married. The goal is to get married and live happily ever after and see the brightness in his eyes and read his work (replace Sylvia). I am getting older. I am getting fatter. I am losing my allure and one day, one terrible day I believe he will leave me for someone else. He will cheat on me. I write to my sister because I cannot take any of this anymore. The isolation and the fact that everyone thinks I am an interloper. Sylvia was not a martyr. Ted is not the villain as he is made out to be. Women cannot leave him alone. They want to be around him all the time.

‘Do you write?’ he asked me. Ted Hughes asked me in the days before he was Poet Laureate.
‘Some.’ And he smiled. ‘Is that funny?’ I asked.
‘No. It’s just that you’re so young and beautiful I thought you would have other things on your mind, other things to fill your time. Your husband for example. Peeling potatoes. I already know you find no allure in peeling potatoes. I thought, oh well I don’t really know what I was thinking. Forgive me. Your English is exquisite. And tell me what do you write? Poetry. Prose. Short stories.’ And he looked at me for the first time as if he could really see me.
‘I write poetry.’
‘And you have a diary?’
‘Don’t all writers have secret diaries?’
And Ted Hughes smiled again. ‘Not to my knowledge. So let us have a drink then to secret diaries.’
‘To secret diaries and abandoning marriages, running out on spouses and adultery.’
‘To adultery. Where are the glasses Assia Wevill?’
‘In the kitchen.’ And I got up and made my way to the kitchen for the wine glasses kept for special occasions. I did not want to see David cry. And when I came back I knew I just had one question on my mind. I had to ask it of him. I couldn’t breathe you see as I stood in the kitchen wondering what exactly I was going to embark on and what he was sacrificing.
‘Ted, are we going to have an affair?’
‘No Assia Wevill. I think I am in love with you. I think I want you to be my wife and the mother of my children. I think I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’
‘What will all your friends say, your family? All of those people who are loyal to the ghost of Sylvia Plath, to Ariel, all of those people who shadow you in London, at launches and cocktail and dinner parties. Ted they will never accept me. You know that. I know that.’
‘Children make all the difference in the world.’
‘I’m losing my looks. I’m getting fat. I thought I saw Sylvia the other day.’
‘Don’t talk like that Assia. You couldn’t have. You will make me think thoughts I do not want to think.’
‘You’re not responsible for her death.’
‘But don’t you see. I do feel responsible. I feel her presence everywhere I go. In our home. In the faces of our children. In our house where we first lived as newlyweds. Where we were so happy, so productive, so creative. God, can’t you see what I’ve done. I am the depressive and it is not the women in my life who are sad, who suffer, who are manic and silent about the sickness, the insanity of it all, the suicidal illness. I knew she was taking sleeping pills, waking up pills. I knew she was going for therapy.’
‘It was all her own doing. Accept that Edward and you will find peace. I don’t think that it sounds cruel.’
‘Beautiful women are always highly strung, emotional, and cruel. Women are crueller to women than men are to women. Assia tell me. Do you think I should have come round today? Maybe it was a bad idea. Do you think we should be alone like this?’
‘You’re not encouraging anything. I made advances. You made advances. Nobody is taking advantage of anyone in this situation. David won’t be home for hours. We have the flat to ourselves, champagne fizz. I think it was a perfect idea you coming around. Forget her now. I am here.’
‘The perfect woman in every way. In every voluptuous shape, curve and form.’
‘But am I intelligent? But do you like reading them?’
‘I think Assia your poems show great promise.’