I Who Have Never Known Men

by Jacqueline Harpman

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.

If someone spoke to me, there would be time, the beginning and end of what they said to me, the moment when I answered, their response.

The briefest conversation creates time. Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages. I begin, I fill them with words, I pile them up, and I still don’t exist because nobody is reading them.