Property of Sylvia Plath

Ellie McKenzie

January 1952

This place can be stifling. I have applied and submitted
and written and studied and my mind has become a
stretched-out piece of salted taffy that I would watch at fairs
with my father go around and around and around. My professors
are either wholly incompetent or harshly critical. I
write down every single note, edit every single thing I scribble
and type. I sat on the lawn yesterday and forced my eyes
to close, laid my book on my chest, and almost slipped into
that space. The one where my thoughts blend together until I
cannot hear them at all. I am yearning for that more and more.

April 1956

He looks at me in the café and I swear my veins are
buzzing again. The blooms outside blow off their stems into
the air, and we sit in silence with books in our hands, neither
reading. I have read pages and pages of his poetry and still
he hands more drafts to edit, even if we spend an hour
bickering over a period at the end of a stanza. Sometimes he
reads mine but I’ve learned to only ask him about my titles
or which publisher to send to, if he has not dragged them out
of me first. Our friends chuckle at our sparring and I smirk
when he stumbles over his arguments. His eyes will flash
when I do that sometimes. The women look at me with knowing
glances, but there is much they will never see. I miss my
mother. I wrote to her yesterday, asked if spring had come for
her too. I hope it has.

September 1958

You are sitting by the window smoking as I try to come up
with something for the workshop tomorrow. My eyes feel like
I smoked but I haven’t done that since before we were married,
and I know that you despise the smell of it on my clothes
even if you come home after a night out smelling like a skunk
once a month. My journals are crammed with journal entries
about this patient and that building but nothing seems to slip
into place on the page. Robert will probably call me to stay
after and talk about the mediocre work I begin to piece together
from poems with no names and prose pieces with stains of
coffee and cigarette ash smeared across them. No, there is nothing
on this that means anything. I will go and I will listen and
I will learn. I head to the bedroom, and you do not look over
from the window.

July 1959

I am pregnant. Ted is overjoyed. I am confused as to
how something could grow consistently inside of me. I must
discipline myself harshly to go to bed at a normal time and
rise in time to make it to the office, let alone hold a child in
my body. I feel as though I have yet to see what I meant to see
before this happened. My mind is folding in on itself as I try to
understand what this means. Ted called his parents; I wrote a
letter to my mother.

May 1960

She is finally asleep, and I am wide awake. I have been
staring at her for hours now, watching her wail and giggle
and smile and stare. Frieda is a mystery to me, one that I can
predict I will never fully understand. When she touches my
cheek with her stubby fingers, I let my heart lift, but I do not
know what to do when she is crying and Ted is hollering about
the noise and I cannot seem to get her quiet. He hollers every
week now.

February 1961

My chest aches. My entire body aches. I lost it yesterday.
He sat with a stone face as the nurses shuffled around and
the doctor shared his condolences. As if this is my doing, my
mistake, my misfortune. I am not sad. I am not mourning. I do
not think he is either.

November 1962

The children are doing well. I have been writing so much
that I forget when it is time to get them from the bus stop.
John is concerned, but I am finally awake. My novel is in its’
final edits, The Bell Jar is going to have to be a good enough
title for now. The children visit Ted every few weeks, I think
they enjoy seeing him. It allows me to spill my mind outward
without interruption. Those days I spend my time spreading papers
through the kitchen and living room, a kettle always going,
John always calling once a day, sometimes as doctor or friend or
both.

January 1963

John convinced me to hire a nurse. She is a nuisance,
always right on time. The children even seem concerned,
prodding me to play and tell them stories more and more often.
The winter has been harsh on all of us, I have to layer their socks
until their feet look formless. It is hard not to snip at them. The
book is almost ready for print, and I can rarely turn my attention
away from that and the poems. At least half of them will go
into the same book, this I know for sure. I spent half the nights
of last month arranging them, but since John gave me those
pills, I cannot do that until early morning. Ted has called several
times this week, as if he can sense my thoughts. He cannot.
He never could. He only guessed until he saw that he was right.
So much like my father. I should call Mother.

Ellie McKenzie is a second-year student at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is currently pursuing a degree in Communications and English while minoring in Creative Writing. She is also a member of the Jiménez-Porter Writers’