01UndatedIt’s time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.Sara Baume / quote ↗
02UndatedAnd I felt like such a failure. I thought: I can't even do mental illness properly.Sara Baume / quote ↗
03UndatedBut no, now I see I never meant to Ben what Ben meant to me. If there was anything I said which resonated in return, he found a better speech elsewhere. My romance went no further than his coat.Sara Baume / quote ↗
05UndatedWhy is it only now that I can see how many ordinary things are actually grotesque?Sara Baume / quote ↗
06UndatedI look at the cake in my mother's arms and think: here stands the only person in the whole world who'd go to such trouble for fractious, ungrateful me.Sara Baume / quote ↗
07UndatedDid it do me any good, early in life, to believe so many things which were not true? Or did it damage me? Pouring a foundation of disappointment, of uncertainty.Sara Baume / quote ↗
08UndatedI never went downstairs to join my housemates around the television. I cooked dinner later than everyone else and carried the plate up to my bedroom. I knew they must have thought me aloof, or a little bit eccentric, or maybe even unkind, but I didn't care. Once the kitchen door swung shut behind me, I was alone, and so everything was okay.Sara Baume / quote ↗
09UndatedThe old summer's-end melancholy nips at my heels. There's no school to go back to; no detail of my life will change come the onset of September; yet still, I feel the old trepidation.Sara Baume / quote ↗
10UndatedBut I have never wanted to be perceived as chatty and bright. I have always wanted to be solemn and mysterious.Sara Baume / quote ↗
11UndatedBut nowadays I feel guilty that I am granted the immunity of the artistically gifted, having never actually achieved anything to prove myself worthy.Sara Baume / quote ↗
12UndatedOur toys were sixteen or seventeen; only the very eldest were in their early twenties, because, apparently, I didn't envision anything of particular interest in life beyond twenty-five. And now I am a greater age than any of the toys were allowed to reach, older than I even cared to imagine as a child.Sara Baume / quote ↗
13UndatedI wish I'd been born with your capacity for wonder. I wouldn't mind living a shorter life if my short life could be as vivid as yours.Sara Baume / quote ↗
14UndatedIn the days approaching Christmas, she always reminds me of the previous year: 'Jane crocheted you an entire poncho, and all you gave her was a bone-shaped beach stone.Sara Baume / quote ↗
17UndatedAnd out the bus window, here is my dead world come true, my whole dead world in motion.Sara Baume / quote ↗
18UndatedSometimes things happen that give me cause to believe I no longer exist. Car park barriers which do not lift when I drive towards them, automatic doors which do not open automatically as I approach.Sara Baume / quote ↗
19UndatedWhat bothered me was all of the time he wasted by drumming, and all the time I wasted by listening to him drum, by taking pleasure in it, for pleasure is almost always a waste of time.Sara Baume / quote ↗
20UndatedThis morning, the sun endures past dawn. I realise that it is August: the summer's last stand.Sara Baume / quote ↗
21UndatedThis morning, I see the lead in my glass tumbler. A slim, bright glint, a silverfish. I feel it collecting in my blood, papercutting the lining of my veins.Sara Baume / quote ↗
22UndatedIt's too warm for red wine; now I mix gin and tonics instead. I find they make the ordinary sensation of living lighter, less ruffled.Sara Baume / quote ↗
23UndatedI know with unqualified certainty that I want to die. But I also know with equivalent certainty that I won't do anything about it. That I will only remain here and wait for death to indulge me.Sara Baume / quote ↗
24UndatedI lie down and think about how this whole long, strange summer ought to end in a substantial event. But, probably, won't. For the first time I acknowledge the possibility that nothing will die, or change, or even happen.Sara Baume / quote ↗
