The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

(I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.)

“Ran over that in Las Vegas.”

Bro's bragging about roadkill on his wall omg

At about this point I began to feel peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the back, and they looked like nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moonbrains.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

The trouble about jumping was that if you didn’t pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom. I thought seven stories must be a safe distance.

That morning I had tried to hang myself.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.