I Who Have Never Known Men

by Jacqueline Harpman

If the narrator has lived a life as best as she could – wildly unconventional, but one that has given her joy in many ways – hasn’t she triumphed over cruelty after all, over having everything stripped from her, her dignity and essential humanity winning in the end?

And now, racked with sobs, I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all.

‘Yes. Some women say that it is for ourselves. What on earth can we do with it? I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful.’

‘In that case, what were men for?’

Did the planet on which I was wandering have a thousand sister planets scattered across the starry sky and, at night, while I was waiting to fall asleep, and my gaze sometimes lit on some distant globe, was the same scene taking place there?

and I was sometimes acutely aware that I was alone, and always would be, and that the only pleasure within my grasp was the all-too-rare one of satisfied curiosity.

but they died, as I am about to die, and what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?