(Morning of) Twenty-Seven Rugsėjis of Twenty Eleven

I hate the days when you lie in your bed and tears fall into your hair. Or when you cry so hard you fall to your knee and pray for mercy. Or curling into the fetal position and wishing away the world. I hate those sorts of days.

Suddenly, I remember this.

"From the Bottom of My Broken Heart"

Every time he gets like this I either comfort him or can't speak. I respond and he knows I'm upset, but I'm too stubborn to admit it. I love him, I think he's perfect. But GOD DAMN. He makes me cry all the time. And not because I'm weak, but because he tears me down. He makes me feel awful about myself. The worst part is that I can't fight. "You're just upset because you know I'm right." And so I just pretend like nothing makes me mad and drop it. Honestly, he said I "lack the brains for critical thinking." Seriously, call me fat, it upsets me for like two minutes; insult my intelligence and I'll cry for hours. Do you understand how much stress I'm under for college? From knowing my work's not as good as I want it to be, but not having the time to do it? Do you know how little sleep I get every night and how awful life is a cup of freaking coffee makes my day? No, apparently not. "I would put up with all your crazy business..." Wow. Add insult to injury. "Love transcends all kinds of boundaries including you being a rude girl."

'Half-blood tears crawl out,
biting the words, "I love you."
Stinging the cracks in the half-blood heart.
Hair pushes together,
falling, falling, falling
___________ fell out of the world.'

LATER ON: (but still morning)

I need to get home so I can watch the Human Centipede 2 [Full Sequence] trailer. October seventh is going to be the best day of my life. Gotta buy tickets and figure out transportation. I wonder if my mom would let me borrow the car for the weekend...

I read "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Gilman this morning.
(If you want to listen to the story, like I did, here are the links: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5).

Anyways, the story is kind of unsettling to read, especially when you're all alone in the silence. The author uses incredible diction and tone to convey the narrator's insanity. As a questing psychologist, I loved it. However, the end seems all the more sketchy to me.

She begins by saying that there is a woman in the wallpaper. She thinks that the woman shakes the "bars" of the wallpaper at night and is free during the day, and that she "creeps."

As the story comes to a close, I watched the narrator digress, suddenly biting off bits of the bed and saying that "I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?" Quite out of character, but fitting with insanity. (Here I note that the room was quite torn; the bedposts had been clawed and scratched, the floor scraped, and the wallpaper torn). Does this mean that, if I go with the theory that there really was a woman in the wall, that she escaped and the narrator is trapped until the next woman comes?

In the end, it is written that all the wallpaper was torn off and that she couldn't be put back. Originally, I thought of the narrator as being simply psychotic, that there was no woman in the wall. I thought, as I looked back, that the yellow wallpaper was her skin, and a metaphor for her entrapment and desire for freedom. That she was trapped by her own body, her own femininity, and her own disease (whatever that was; I didn't really take the time to find out, maybe later). So, when she says "And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back" I thought it to mean that she had literally pulled away her skin. In her mind, it didn't hurt because she was crazy and peeling away the wallpaper, trying to let some woman, shaking the bar free.

Maybe the woman who creeps is really how she pictures herself free-and outside.

I mean, psychotic people peel their skin off, right?

But, let's look at this the other way, I mean, there's a lot of evidence (shallow/obvious evidence, but still evidence). She says at the end ""in spite of you and Jane." However, THERE WAS NEVER A CHARACTER NAMED JANE. There was a John (the narrator's husband) and a Jennie (the narrator's sister-in-law). Who is Jane? Many theorize it as a typo, but think of it this way: JOHN AND JANE DOE. I don't think that a coincidence.