Free I Await the Devil's Coming - Unexpurgated and Annotated by Mary MacLane Page B

maid-senses. And I think of my Nothingness, and I ask myself were it not better to walk the earth an outcast, a solitary woman, and meet and face even these, than that each and every one of my woman-senses should wear slowly, painfully to shreds, and strain and break - in this unnameable Nothing?
    Oh, the dreariness - the hopelessness of Nothing!
    There are no words to tell it. And things are always hardest to bear when there are no words for them.
    However great one’s gift for language may be there is always something that one can not tell.
    I am weary of self - always self. But it must be so.
    My life is filled with self .
    If my soul could awaken fully perhaps I might be lifted out of myself - surely I should be. But my soul is not awake. It is awakening, trying to open its eyes; and it is crying out blindly after something, but it can not know . I have a dreadful feeling that it will stay always like this.
    Oh, I feel everything - everything! I feel what might be. And there is Nothing. There are six tooth-brushes.
    Would I stop for a few fine distinctions, a theory, a natural law even, to escape from this into Happiness - or into something greatly less?
    Misery - misery! If only I could feel it less!
    Oh, the weariness, the weariness - as I await the Devil’s coming.

    February 8
    Often I walk out to a place on the flat valley below the town, to flirt with Death. There is within me a latent spirit of coquetry, it appears.
    Down on the flat there is a certain deep dark hole with several feet of water at the bottom.
    This hole completely fascinates me. Sometimes when I start out to walk in a quite different direction, I feel impelled almost irresistibly to turn and go down on the flat in the direction of the fascinating, deep black hole.
    And here I flirt with Death. The hole is so narrow - only about four feet across - and so dark, and so deep! I don’t know whether it was intended to be a well, or whether it is an abandoned shaft of some miner. At any rate it is isolated and deserted, and it has a rare loving charm for me.
    I go there sometimes in the early evening and kneel on the edge of it, and lean over the dark pit, with my hand grasping a wooden stake that is driven into the ground near by. And I drop little stones down and hear them splash hollowly, and it sounds a long way off.
    There is something wonderfully soothing, wonderfully comforting to my unrestful, aching wooden heart in the dark mystery of this fascinating hole. Here is the End for me, if I want it - here is the Ceasing, when I want it. And I lean over and smile quietly.
    “No flowers,” I say to myself, “no weeping idiots, no senseless funeral, no oily undertaker fussing over my woman’s-body, no useless Christian prayers. Nothing but this deep dark restful grave.”
    No one would ever find it. It is a mile and a half from any house.
    The water - the dark still water at the bottom - would gurgle over me and make an end quickly. Or if I feared there was not enough water, I would bring with me a syringe and some morphine and inject an immense quantity into one white arm, and kneel over the tender darkness until my youth-weary, waiting-worn senses should be overcome, and my slim light body should fall. It would splash into the water at bottom - it would follow the little stones at last. And the black muddy water would soak in and begin the destroying of my body, and murky bubbles would rise so long as my lungs continued to breathe. Or perhaps my body would fall against the side of the hole, and the head would lie against it out of the water. Or perhaps only the face would be out of the water, turned upward to the light above - or turned half-down, and the hair would be darkly wet and heavy, and the face would be blue-white below it, and the eyes would sink inward.
    “The End, the End -” I say softly and ecstatically. Yet I do not lean farther out. My hand does not loosen its tight grasp on the wooden stake. I am only flirting with Death