draining's Diaryland Diary

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Hygiene

�I hadn�t washed my hair for three weeks�.
I hadn�t slept for seven nights.
My mother told me I must have slept, it was impossible not to sleep in all that time, but if I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, luminous course of the second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock through their circles and semicircles, every night for seven nights, without missing a second, or a minute, or an hour.
It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash the next.
I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.
It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.
It made me tired just to think of it.
I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.�
-Sylvia Plath, from The Bell Jar, as quoted by Kay Redfield Jamison in Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.

11:07 p.m. - 2006-02-02
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