American Masterpiece. The Soul selects her own Society

It was early spring and chilly.  Hot chocolate was calling as I moved in from out of the night air.  I went inside to read an assignment that coincided with a lecture, and then I settled in to start writing. After words, it seemed that prose, verses poesy, was the only thing releasing me from my mind, a mind that was in no mood for decoration; a break in the cords that create solemn.  
   
The pages never come easy.  I thought that if I should cry and stain the page with pain and rage, then I’ll see it through until words subside as I rosined my eyes to the tune of a white oleander’s poison.  Then there is something finished; a few more pages I never knew about myself. It was exhausting, but in the end it was barely making sense, and so I withdrew for the time being.  
 
Surprised by what I had found, I looked at what I wrote as some distant reader, perhaps, in the far away future, that when I was alive they never knew.  It’s a lonely story of a girl that looked happy for the world where nothing but the core would do to be removed as the blackness is cut away.  The center of pain is there, and it is there that lies the truth in remains. It hurts my heart sometimes, but I will not subside willfully.  And the prose ― it is only the residue of a night terror that fell from the scene inside.       
 
 
I went to school today; the last stretch of the semester after Spring Break, and there is American Masterpieces, ENGL 1600. I learned about Emily Dickinson. Her poems were only numbered, never named.  It is ironic that I find her name as one synonymous with poetry.  It’s interesting that her last words spoken were: “Oh, is that all there is?”  She was talking about the water she was given at her death bed.  Perhaps it is that she wanted whiskey, or hot chocolate maybe.  I don’t know why there are some of the things we see, we see or don’t want to see.  These things just sound poetic, I guess, and wonderful for the mind to grasp at the fantasy, or to terror at something foreboding.    
 
A famously placed line from poem 465, I heard a Fly buzz when I died, "I could not see to see".  It was significant as I wisped the fly away from my chocolate that followed me.  I guess it is that my hot chocolate will follow me forever, and the fly, as it is now a part of who I am with reverence to remembrance and the tug of a term, self-fulfilled prophecy.  My mother warned me of the ironies she knew nothing of when I was young and told me to leave them well enough alone.  Why didn’t she realize it was the one thing that I would spy at the wonder, for the rest of my waking days?  Unrested, there has been a fly as long as there has been death itself.  Hot chocolate, buttermilk, shoes, and writing perhaps was invented to entice it, and then to counteract it. My soul of woman, we should be stronger in the face of adversity that only fear has left with us.  
 
It is not the open mind that I fear; it is the mind I fear that fears itself, in that it traps itself into such an existence.  Sometimes a mind will do anything to prove its courage, even if it’s just going to college and learning things thought out of the spectrum of knowing.  And the writing, as I sit alone with my thoughts of the past to try and make sense of it, I learn of myself.  Writing is lonely. And yet I’m not alone at all when I think of the celebrations, and remember that I can lean on the courage of those I admire and aspire towards their greatness.  I learn of myself at every turn of the page, and I embrace the life and the irony that is ever encompassing and woven throughout history; it is there to discover. It is history that I love, and tomorrow will forever be tomorrow at the ready with its unreachable certainty. Now and then, I laugh at my mother; she was ridiculous at hysterical moon tactics. But and I laugh in spite of myself the most.  
 
Emily Dickenson:  She was well read.  She was an amazing poet, and as a woman she is a force that now flows within me as a breaking edge.  Today I found a newfound respect for her.  In fact she did own a Newfoundland; a hound, and I'm sure they were quite witty with each other.  She had a best friend that was stricken by death at a very young age, Emily wrote about it, but she was not afraid of the very nature that Life encompasses.  It is that we write about what we've come to terms with.  She valued learning, nature & science, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  She wrote nearly 1,800 poems, where only seven were published. She was never famous in her day.  Emily Dickenson toyed with talks of publishing through correspondences of a friend, she was never sure if her words were alive enough.  She always wore white, and I think that I know the reason.  Maybe it is the reason that she’s not quite smiling in the darkened dress; it’s because there was no air conditioning. Emily loved the outdoors, and it is white that is self-cooling and reflective.  People love their talks and chit-chats over purity and its symbolisms. She lived in changing times of the Puritanism and received Emerson’s Self-Reliance and Nature, hot off the presses; she was thrilled with the freedom, even if it was in her own mind. The mind inside, this is where the key inlays to unlock the gate-keeper. The truth is amazing. There is what we see, and then there is reality.      
      
It’s early spring, and it’s chilly outside. Some hot chocolate and Emily Dickinson sound lovely. “I must go in; the fog is rising.”  It was inspiring.  I saw myself lying beneath it in some poem I wrote yesterday, through a vision I had long ago, right before I awakened.  It is now and then, that I stand “still” and unafraid.  
 
 
They shut me up in Prose  
As when a little Girl  
They put me in the Closet  
Because they liked me "still"  
 
Still! Could themself have peeped  
And seen my Brain — go round  
They might as wise have lodged a Bird  
For Treason — in the Pound  
 
Himself has but to will  
And easy as a Star  
Abolish his Captivity  
And laugh — No more have I  
 
Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)  
Famous-authors-last-words; I remain a skeptic.