Sylvia in Love

Sylvia Plath is in love with me. She writes me poems. They arrive in envelopes addressed in her school-girl handwriting. 

On good days, she characterizes me as a towering goddess, reborn as a spirit of her burning desire. I am flaming, ravenous feminist rage. Hungry.  Biting. It’s really quite flattering. Once I was a tree hanging heavy with ripe fruit and she ate it, juice dribbling down her chin. Once I rode naked and bareback on a horse at dawn. It feels good to be seen through her eyes and through her words. There’s freedom. Naturalness. Ease. In Sylvia’s eyes, I am formidable. Colossal even.

On bad days, the poems have a different tone. I am Medusa with reptilian hair, with forked tongue, with murderous eyes. I am a tyrant who rules my people with an iron fist, sadistic and cruel. I am Hades, with a boot on her neck, dragging sweet Sylvia as Persephone down to hell. I will lure my Sylvia to me, trap her, quivering, in my snare. I am a bee in her bonnet who stings.  Buzz, baby, buzz. I feel I am monstrous.

It’s exhausting, how she oscillates between fiendish praise and crucifixion.  I know I’m no picnic, but Sylvia, woo, she is a lot to handle. 

She worries me sometimes too. She writes of such despair. My love like a needle, pricking, scratching her skin. My jealousy at her writing, eclipsing mine like the moon. The thrill and rush of blood, the contrast of red and white. She writes balled up with her legs to her chest under her desk. She writes from the early morning hours while her children are sleeping. She writes by candlelight on her nightstand, squinting. She writes from her kitchen, from her cooking, from her cutting board. She writes she writes she writes. 

And I am jealous of Sylvia, of her productivity, of her abilities, of her success. She’s right to see my green eyes.  But I am not jealous of her sadness or her frustration. There isn’t much difference between her frustration and mine. Creatively stifled by tasks and by children – by circumstances we love and loath all at once. She’s just more articulate.  She can give voice to her every inkling, while I am mute and paralyzed with longing. Too tired, I lack motivation, and so I lie and cry about it.

I guess we all have our shit.

One day, she takes my hand. We march up a grassy hill in the countryside. The air is green and thick with fresh rain. I can hear our Wellingtons squelching, squelching through the beautiful wet. At the top of the hill, she turns to me.  Her blond hair whipping across her face in the wind. I feel huge when she looks at me like this. I feel enormous. She squeezes my hand, “You make me so stupidly happy,” she says, and rests her head on my shoulder.

I know it will end. It always does. But I want to leave Sylvia here, with her head on my shoulder, clutching my hand, on a hilltop, in her rain boots, with the wind in her hair.

I want to keep her here. Suspended. In love. Enormous.