Alice

The only thing that has excited me recently is my friends making a person. The night she was born I felt as if they were the only people in the world who have ever had a baby. I cried, and I cried on my way to the hospital, and I nearly cried on the Friday before she was born. I inspected her in my arms and couldn't believe that we all started out that small. AW said that she now understands why parents feel they own their children. Because to begin with they do, they MADE the child, WITH THEIR BODIES. I find this an incredibly strange idea. AW will no longer ever just be one person. This person I have known since we were children, whose body I have seen change over the years I have known her, has now pushed out another person. I am lucky that she is so open about the process, because it is fascinating and grotesque and beautiful. All the horrible things pale in comparison with the end product. That babies have the capacity to make me use a voice that is higher in pitch, use words I wouldn't usually use and make strange pigeon-like noises amazes me. If I ever have a baby I want to be able to spend hours with it when it is born, alone, to be able to make animal sounds, and feel primal and powerfully preternatural.

Winter is killing me, and I am hating the colours, temperatures and feel of the air. I can't bear the light and every day there isn't a pure clean light I despair and wish my eyes could feel light. This year I think it is more dramatic than any other year I remember. And I can't understand why suddenly I am so affected by the winter gloom.

Recently I read some Rupert Brooke poetry. Because I read his poetry so obsessively as a romatic teenager, the lines have never left my head, and they often occur to me at odd times. That sickly feeling of nostalgia was so strong I wanted to cry. Not from sadness but just from a kind of supernatural familiarity. He dies when he was 28. I remember reading a memoir in St David's Park in Hobart when I was 16, and crying when I finished it because I couldn't bear the idea of his death.

Apparently Edmund White spoke at Readings recently, and I missed it. I wanted to cry then too, because he is old and has AIDS, and I had that fatatlistic feeling that I can't bear.

See, winter is killing me.