It may seem a little maudlin or over-blown now but reading it over, I can still see me as I am today, decades later. It is a bit of a jolt that I do. Ah well, very few writers of any note have been happy, balanced and well-adjusted people, it seems! Tragedy and melancholy and taking one's self too seriously at times is a common thread. At least now I can usually laugh a bit at all of the drama! So this is the person who became a writer of romance...not so odd, that. I lived in an apartment in this house at that time. If memory serves, it was a bit shabbier then, a block from the main line railroad track in Flagstaff, AZ. I took this picture when I was in Arizona for the reunion in June. Changes and sameness...
On this, the eve of my twenty-sixth
birthday, I begin a new journal, diary and collection of my wandering prose and
poesy. How many pages I have filled with how much nonsense since May 1, 1955
when I first began to record my life! How many triumphs and tears and dull,
dull days have come and passed and been recorded. How many names have appeared
in how many paper dreams? At that instant, they seemed so important and now
they are faded like flowers in the sun to a meaningless dust. Bits and
fragments live, I guess, and even shape my present dreams, even as do the dark
shadows of past sufferings and sorrows.
Were that the name now in my heart could stay.
I think only one has been closer and meant as much. And he, as I have said
before, is as if dead and buried now. My time with him might as well have been
in another life. So much I’d undo if I only could, yet it has all strengthened
and shaped me into what I am now, whatever good is in me now. I’ve
no illusions about myself; I learned more from experience and example
than from doctrine and lecture. The flaws of the parents are magnified and the
virtues miniaturized, I guess. I am not noble or good or great; I know it and I
am sorry. At times I rationalize and attempt to justify but in my soul I bow a
humble head and measure myself with blunt and bitter honesty. I fall far short
of what I should be, would like to be. Perhaps I’m not even strong and great
enough to be truly bad!
There is always a little awe in
starting a new book, a desire for a crystal ball or powers of clairvoyance to
see over the wall into the future. Where I will be tomorrow, many tomorrows, I
can only wonder. My suffering and sorrow
is not over. That the stars tell me and my soul knows. Like Angelique (heroine
in a series of novels I had read) I am destined to love fiercely and search,
reach, strive, cry. I am to know the weary miles of many a lonely road in
search of an often vague dream.
I think perhaps this time I have found him,
although I have thought so before and been very wrong. The bits and pieces of
the dream that has lived in the pages I have filled for fourteen years seem to
have been incarnated, unified and housed in…(this person). The impossible
barrier between us only intensifies and distils the bittersweet clarity and
beauty of my feelings. What a hopelessly incurable and impractical romanticist,
idealist and dreamer I am–still. For all the scars, the seeming changes, I am
not so different from that twelve year old. “Older, but no wiser, for in my
heart the dreams are still the same…”
Oh, I do not want to marry Marvin K
or Casey Tibbs now, but I still write, still live more in my dreams than in
reality and still cannot cope with life as it is. I still want security and
appreciation and am still torn between proud and lofty aspirations, old and
shackling loyalties, and a fear and lack of confidence. At twelve I was just on
the first edge of awakening and discontent. Am I now just on the last edge or
in the center? I think perhaps I’ll never grow up because somehow I stepped
abruptly from childhood to adulthood—in death and violence and lust. The
missing links can’t be retrieved now but there is a break, a flaw, in the
continuity of my existence, my life and growth. Thus I stand on the eve of my
twenty sixth birthday, alone…
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