From merrie@umich.eduSun Dec 4 17:08:11 1994 Date: Sun, 4 Dec 1994 01:48:00 -0500 (EST) From: Merrie Haskell To: thari@umich.edu Cc: samolnar@umich.edu Subject: Laughter's Diary 7 Time is a foolish concept, and has been causing me great distress of late, but finally, at last, it has slowed down. There have been moments in the last days that feel like it has purposely sped up, maliciously, just so I am not allowed to think before I speak or act. But now... everything is silent and slow, and the only sound I hear is my heartbeat, loud and resonant, lub-dub, lub-dub, and with a pause that encompasses aeons of thought in between. It is morning in Amber, and the light shines eerily, duskily, brownly, through the branches of the thorn bushes outside my mother's window. There is a dry feel to the air, but I know that the dust I am almost choking on is entirely imaginary, something I made up when I considered coming onto a scene like this thirteen years into the future. But it's now, and that is not my daughter lying cursed, it is my mother, and there is no dust. It occurs to me, as the focus of my heartbeat comes thudding into my ears and then out again, that the myths that keep manifesting themselves in my life are out of proportion. There's nothing larger than life about any of this, there's nothing reassuring that anything will come to a happy ending. The heroine is supposed to win through, and the trials and tribulations of the past are to seem as nothing when the happy ending comes. Granted, given the average lifespan of an Amberite, a girl doesn't leave the role of the confused ingenue behind until she's reached a hundred and twenty at least, so I should be more patient. But every day it is hit home to me that this is not one of Elizabeth's comedies I'm frolicking about in. It's fucking sick, is what it is. Consider the disproportionate mythologies I've run across in the last day and a half. The dragons. That's a good spot to start. First, Ironclaw. Beowulf, St. George, Ged of Earthsea all spring readily to mind. If I were any real heroine, I would have done better than managed not to pee my pants when confronted with him. And if this were a proper sort of story, killing Clytemnestra over my honor, at the very least, would have been allowed. I've never been particularly attached to the more rigid standards of honor that I've witnessed in my life, but I'm quite sure I don't have to allow insult to be added to my injury. It's not in the rules anywhere. I should have thrown that bauble and released the Orestes or Electra inside to take that scaly critter out. There, two prime examples of the extreme nature of the anti-mythos of my life from the trip to Lazarus. Lazarus, in and of itself, is a dreadful and annoyingly optimistic name for that shadow, and one that seems strikingly forboding (in retrospect, can it be called foreboding?) given where I'm standing now, at the doorway, watching my mother play out a story and a curse I thought I was done with. This, above all else, is the most twisted example to date. The fact that Oberon the faerie king had a counterpart who also happened to by my grandfather is fine. But this whole business of shadows... this duplication of self many times throughout the universe... Libby's betrayal and her demise are going to give me nightmares the first time I don't go to sleep dead drunk, and it's all wreaking havoc with my notions of metaphysics. What does individuality mean now? Nothing. Oh, good, my heartbeat again. Lub.... None of this is helped at all by the secret admirer situation. I suppose, in the abstract, being wooed is a fine thing, but this is confusing me. I think I have the capacity to fall in love with any number of people, and right now, I'm *afraid* to do so, for fear I pick the wrong guy. Hm... that's some deep bull-shit psychoanalysis you've got going on here, Laughter. Dub... It's like "The Tell-tale Heart" in slow motion in here. Well, Laughter? Does it matter who the admirer is, really? If you decide who you're in love with, will it matter at all if he's the admirer, whether he loves you back or not? Well, yes. A little. At least I'm trying, so I won't ask myself why, since it would doubtless cripple the system. Now for the real question: of the three, who do you think you could love? Driscoll? When Ahab transported us into that apartment today, did your heart skip a beat because there was a pistol pointed at us, or was it the fact that *he* was there, bearded, bandaged and bespectacled as he was? But he *fed your shadow to a dragon*. Falling for him would be insane, given who your father is, and who our shadows were. No-- except that he'd be your chance to set right everything that went wrong with Cal. Except that you already know you have the capacity to love someone very much like him. We will not dwell on the scene where he had his arms around me-- mainly because my hair was on fire, and that's unromantic at best. Shard? He has always seemed as though he was very poorly socialized as a child. Up until I found him in Foil three evenings ago, I thought him a very handsome idiot at best. But he is an actor of some caliber, and he *is* very handsome. And he put me to bed without taking undue advantage of that. That was very gentlemanly. Disappointingly so, one might add. And Foster? The difference between the age when I left home and the age when I participated in the madness of May was almost seven years, so naturally I don't feel comfortable with elements of this... as well as the fact that the older woman scenario is bad. However, he will in time grow out of this, and I could probably bear some uncomfortable years for the sake of Foster. Which leaves you where, Laughter? Lub... It leaves me nowhere, Laughter. I'm gonna make the bastard who did this to my mom pay through the nose. Secret admirers and star-crossed lovers can wait their turn. Dub...