Schoolgirl

Glasses obstruct whatever emotions that might appear on your face—passion, grace, fury, weakness, innocence, sorrow. And it's curious how it becomes impossible to try to communicate with your eyes.

Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late. The thought occurred to me as I lay there. You wait and wait for happiness, and when finally you can't bear it any longer, you rush out of the house, only to hear later that a marvelous happiness arrived the following day at the home you had abandoned, and now it was too late.

Tomorrow will probably be another day like today. Happiness will never come my way. I know that. But it's probably best to go to sleep believing that it will surely come, tomorrow it will come.

But if those people were to think about it from our perspective, and see how we had tried to endure despite how terribly painful it all was, and how we had even tried to listen carefully, as hard as we could, to what the world might have to say, they would see that, in the end, the same bland lessons were always being repeated over and over, you know, well, merely to appease us. And they would see how we always experienced the same embarrassment of being ignored.

Indeed, Mother and I are both as weak as the other.

I couldn't stand it. The body had no connection to my mind, it developed on its own accord, which was unbearable and bewildering. It made me miserable that I was rapidly becoming an adult and that I was unable to do anything about it.

I wish I could die like this, as a girl.

Really, I don't know which is the true me. What ever will I do when there aren't any more books to read,

Given my lack of experience, if my books were taken away from me, I would be utterly devastated. That's how much I depend on what's written in books. I'll read one book and be completely wild about it—I'll trust it, I'll assimilate it, I'll sympathize with it, I'll try to make it a part of my life. Then, I'll read another book and, instantly, I'll switch over to that one.

Mother still treated me like a child, without the slightest faith in me.