Читать книгу Hazards of Time Travel - Joyce Carol Oates - Страница 7

They would not have come for me, naïvely I drew their attention to me. Willingly I dared what I should not have dared.

Of my own free will misjudging. Or rather, not judging—not thinking. In vanity and stupidity and now I am lost.

Sometimes on my knees in a posture of prayer I am able to break through the “censor barrier”—to remember …

But my brain hurts so! It is a terrible effort like struggling against the gravity of Jupiter.

My Exile-status forbids me to speak to anyone here of my sentence or of my life before Exile and so I am doubly lonely.

Though rarely alone in this strange place I am very lonely and am not sure that I can persevere.

My sentence is “only” four years. It might have been “life.”

Or, it might have been Deletion.

On my knees each night straining to remember, to recall my old, lost self, I try to be grateful, my sentence was not Deletion.

And I try to be grateful, no one in my family was arrested as a collaborator/facilitator of Treason, with me.