MihaElla > Recent Status Updates

From that point on, it's all a mystery. Say an egg is fertilized. It's going to be a girl, and she hasn't been born yet. In the baby girl's ovaries (scary to think, but she's already got them), she's got seven million eggs, more than she'll ever have after being born. From then on, the number only drops. When the girl's born, she's got maybe a million, and she'll never get any new ones.

Your aunt has always been a bookworm. You should've heard her, using all those difficult words as a little girl. She was a smart kid. I don't know the first thing about literature. Can you believe she's going to be a real author?

…but Mum, for a woman on her own, Makiko said solemnly, she really did everything she could.

I started to say that was why she died so young, but kept my mouth shut.

then,when we were fighting,at the end,when she was mad but looked like she was about to cry,she shouted, 'What can I do?We gotta eat, right?' That's when I said it.It's your fault for having me.I realized something after that,though.It's not her fault she was born.

I've already decided.I'm never having kids.No way.I was thinking about saying sorry. I really wanted to.But then it was too late. Mum had to go to work.

It appeared that the preoccupation, or shame, or insatiable curiosity that drove Makiko to fixate on her breasts was about more than size alone. Color was a major factor. I tried to imagine Makiko getting out of the bath, whatever time that was for her, and heading over to the fridge to grab the two small bottles of medicine (to make it pinker, by the way), which she proceeded to apply on her own nipples, ..

But that was tomorrow. We could worry about tomorrow when it came. What mattered most right now is how we would spend the remainder of today, even if it was half over.

I've been thinking about getting breast implants.

You'd think that other things were on her mind. Makiko was going on forty. Where was her life taking her? How was she doing financially? What about her daughter? There were lots of other things she could have talked about, and all of them took precedence over the implants.

But who was I to judge?

My life was like a dusty shelf in an old bookstore, where every volume was exactly where it had been for ages, the only discernible change being that my body has aged another ten years.

It was their past condemning his present. He glanced at her.

Damn women, he thought, they’re so hard, so unimaginative. Curse their little inquisitive minds. What did their ‘education’ amount to? It only made her critical, censorious. Old Eleanor, with all her rambling and stumbling, was worth a dozen of Peggy any day. She was neither one thing nor the other, neither in the fashion nor out of it, he thought..

Happy in this world, happy with living people. But how can one be happy ? she asked herself, in a world bursting with misery. On every placard at every street corner was Death; or worse - tyranny, brutality, torture, the fall of civilisation, the end of freedom. We here, she thought, are only sheltering under a leaf, which will be destroyed. And then Eleanor says the world is better, because two..

But we're enjoying ourselves, said Eleanor. Come and enjoy yourself, too.

She pointed to the floor at her side. Peggy let herself down onto the floor at her side. Give up brooding, thinking, analysing, Eleanor meant she knew. Enjoy the moment-- but could one? she asked, pulling her skirts round her feet as she sat down. Eleanor bent over and tapped her on the shoulder...

That was what it came to--thirty years of being husband and wife-- tut-tut-tut, and chew-chew-chew. It sounded like the half-inarticulate munchings of animals in a stall. Tut-tut-tut, and chew-chew-chew, as they trod out the soft steamy straw in the stable; as they wallowed in the primeval swamp, prolific, profuse, half-conscious, he thought, listening vaguely to the good-humoured patter...

She laughed, happily in time with a joke, so that it seemed appropriate. But one wants somebody to laugh with, she thought. Pleasure is increased by sharing it. Does the same hold good of pain? she mused. Is that the reason why we all talk so much of ill-health, because sharing things lessens things? Give pain, give pleasure an outer body, and by increasing the surface diminish them…But the thought slipped.

It was the force that she had put into the words that impressed her, not the words. It was as if she still believed with passion— she, old Eleanor—in the things that man had destroyed. A wonderful generation, she thought, as they drove off. Believers…

Suddenly he said aloud:
Possessiveness is the devil.

Maggie looked at him. Did he mean herself--herself and the baby? No. There was a tone in his voice that told her he was thinking not of her.

What are you thinking? she asked
About the woman I'm in love with, he said. Love ought to stop on both sides, don't you think, simultaneously? But it won't -- that's the devil..

Things can’t go on for ever, she thought. Things pass, things change, she thought, looking up at the ceiling. And where are we going? Where? Where?…

She twisted her thick hair, with the grey strand in it, rapidly into a coil; hung the jewel, a red blob like congealed raspberry jam with a gold seed in the centre, round her neck; and gave one glance at the woman who had been for fifty-five years so familiar that she no longer saw her -- Eleanor Pargiter. That she was getting old was obvious;

Her past seemed to be rising above her present. And for some reason she wanted to talk about her past; to tell them something about herself that she had never told anybody-- something hidden. She paused, gazing at the flowers in the middle of the table without seeing them. There was a blue knot in the yellow glaze she noticed.

No, said Maggie. Rose has red hair.

Red hair? Sara exclaimed. I thought it was grey—a little wisp straggling from under a black bonnet, she added

No, said Maggie. She has a great deal of hair, and it’s red

Red hair, red Rose, Sara exclaimed. She spun round on her toe

Rose of the flaming heart; Rose of the burning breast; Rose of the weary world—red, red Rose

Dazed in a rapture of contemplation, shading her eyes with peacocks' feathers dipped in the morning dew...

It was a pity, as she stepped onto the pavement and caught a glimpse of her own figure in a tailor's window, not to dress better, not to look nicer. Always reach-me-downs, coats and skirts from Whiteleys. But they saved time, and the years after all -she was over forty- made one care very little what people thought. They used to say, why don't you marry? Why don't you do this or that, interfering. But not any longer.

He felt depressed and disappointed. He had not seen her alone; he had not told her anything. Perhaps he never would tell anybody anything. After all, he thought as he went downstairs, slowly, heavily, it was his own affair; it didn’t matter to anybody else. One must burn one’s own smoke, he thought as he took his hat.

They had lit the gas. She gazed at the Judge himself. He was now lying back in his great craved chair under the Lion and the Unicorn, listening. He looked infinitely sad and wise, as if words had been beating upon him for centuries. Now he opened his heavy eyes, wrinkled his forehead, and the little hand that emerged frailly from the enormous cuff wrote a few words in the great volume.

She was very hungry;she was still rather breathless. She felt a little 'spun round' as she put it to herself.What did you spin things round on?she wondered, helping herself to bread sauce --a pivot? The scene has changed so often that morning; and every scene required a different adjustment; bringing this to the front; sinking that to the depths. And now she felt nothing; hungry merely; merely a chicken-eater; blank.

When I was your age, Miss Craddock continued, remembering her role as teacher, I would have given my eyes to have the opportunities you have, to meet the people you meet, to know the people you know

Old Chuffy? said Kitty, remembering Miss Craddock’s profound admiration for that light of learning

You irreverent girl! Miss Craddock expostulated. The greatest historian of his age!

Well, he doesn’t talk…

He set the glass on the table in front of him. He turned again to the Antigone.He read; then he sipped; then he read; then he sipped again. A soft glow spread over his spine at the nape of his neck. The wine seemed to press open little dividing doors in his brain. And whether it was the wine or the words or both, a luminous shell formed,a purple fume, from which out stepped a Greek girl; yet she was English.

Somewhere there’s beauty, Delia thought, somewhere there’s freedom, and somewhere, she thought, he is— wearing his white flower…

At length the moon rose and its polished coin, though obscured now and then by wisps of cloud, shone out with serenity, with severity, or perhaps with complete indifference. Slowly wheeling, like the rays of a searchlight, the days, the weeks, the years passed one after another across the sky.

They looked at each other. Their eyes spoke. Expectations, longings, disappointments and ancient joys revived in their souls, brightening their happiness. They knew each other from the beginning of the beginnings and their acquaintance was for eternity.

-You! murmured her lips in a voice as sweet as a drop of fresh honey.

-You! whispered Toma, quelling, as if from another world.

Whole day he grinded his pain in solitude.He tried all tricks to deceive his soul. She was a woman like so many thousands of thousands. Has she disappeared? Another woman will appear on his path, same as this one appeared for him.
But like her there is no other in the world! Was she beautiful? There are others that are much,much more beautiful. All he has to do is extend his hand.But the secrets in her eyes!