pafib #1
.possible attitudes found in books 1) I don't know what's happening to me 2) what does it mean? 3) seized with the deepest sadness, I know not why 4) I am lost, my head whirls, I know not where I am 5) I lose myself 6) I ask you, what have I come to? 7) I no longer know where I am, what is this country? 8) had I fallen from the skies, I could not be more giddy 9) a mixture of pleasure and confusion, that is my state 10) where am I, and when will this end? 11) what shall I do? I do not know where I am
—from 'Alice', in Sixty Stories, Donald Barthelme, Penguin, New York 1993
This is the first in a series of eleven.
I don’t know what’s happening to me but I think it’s bad. My emotions are squirming through the carapace, now cracked, that kept them in. I don’t think other people can see them. They leave tendrils in me as they emerge, so that I feel an echo when my heartbreak or a small happiness wriggles out and envelops somebody else.