Thoughts on Thoughts

In her late short-story collection,

On Thoughts, her unnamed protagonist

And narrator of the title piece

Isn’t contemplating suicide

So much as the thought of suicide,

Amongst all of her thoughts on dying,

On ends, and how to handle them well.

Around the middle of the story,

She does, in fact, attempt suicide,

But she survives, and most of the tale

Is delivered retrospectively,

As she muses on prior musings

And how they have come to feel distant,

Artifacts of someone else’s thought,

A kind of family photo album,

In which one sees the resemblances

Among the faces and to oneself,

But mediated by so much time—

The world they’re from, the world she’s in now.

In the interval, she’s grown attached

To the place she tried to kill herself,

Out in the woods near her house—at first

She feels like she’s checking on a wound

To see how it’s healing. Over years,

Her visits become more gestural,

More like someone absentmindedly

Fingering a half-forgotten scar.

She comes to find the spot comforting,

A place of familiar contentment,

A holy place, a sanctuary.

On one visit, she catches herself

Nodding at favorite trees and rocks

As if they were dear acquaintances.

She wonders why she feels at home here,

Where she’d tried to join the inhuman.

I just wanted to be them, she ends.