I Am Curious (Thirty)

May 1

Another month.

Four of them gone in this my thirtieth year. Eight of them yet to go.

I haven’t felt much like writing in this book. (Or in anything else.) In the past couple of weeks my world has closed up. Or closed in on me. There are great stretches of time in which nothing seems to happen. When I am not with him I hardly seem to exist.

I force myself to eat, but still continue to lose weight. I have never been really thin before. Thin in the sense that another would look at me and say, “That girl is too thin, she ought to gain a few pounds.” Thin enough so that, if the present trend continues, I will begin to look like something out of Dachau, and not long out of Dachau at that. I think I like being thin, actually. I think I like my body very much. There is nothing superfluous about it.

How do I spend the hours? The odd thing is that I hardly seem to know myself. When I am not with him — and I only see him every few days, and only for several hours at a time — life loses its color and becomes a black-and-white movie, colorless and lacking in dimension.

A book I read, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. About a teen-age schizophrenic, and she didn’t see depth or colors in real life, only in her self-constructed world of imagination.

Is it possible that I am schizophrenic? That Eric and his entire world are a hallucination, a trick of my own warped mind? That he does not exist?

Prove to yourself, Giddings, that you are not deluding yourself.

A syllogism or tautology or conundrum, one of those things of which I can never remember which is which, meaning that you can’t prove any such thing. No, I am not schizophrenic. Yes, Eric exists.

I just started writing this because it’s May. What do I care about writing this?

I get up, I lie in bed several hours dreaming. I eat or don’t eat I have coffee. I walk and walk and walk, endless walks all over Manhattan. I never talk to anyone while I walk. Sometimes I buy something. Not often. When I do — a book, a magazine, a souvenir, an article of clothing — I most often leave it somewhere. Either because I consciously decide I don’t want it or because I just lose it, forget it, and then it is gone and I am somewhere else.

I can’t write any more of this.