bopis

Thinking so much these days about what it is to be a woman, I wonder whether an ingrained sense of guilt is not a feminine characteristic. A man who has no children may feel personally deprived but he does not feel guilty, I suspect. A woman who has no children is always on the defensive.

May Sarton
Diary entry
February 4, 1975

Endeavored to write versus the cold. Typed: “You go against a good thing and sometimes the good thing fights back.” Nice to have little need for fury. Just type away, generate heat between the bone of your finger and the plastic key. Type and type until that spark of faith: somewhere there must be fire. Scrolling along the pages I wrote and rewrote, I found something of value. I stroked the letters on the monitor as if they were strands. I traced the font and imagined depressions of an old lost pen. Saw the ink feather out to the white of the screen. I called the file "daughter.rtf" but felt need for a more specific name. Cold usurped my lungs the moment I understood that when I successfully renamed her, I would amount to deletion.