A Reprise

  Frances, a Volks Super Dollfie Cute Kaede from 2004, is the latest addition to my doll family, purchased October 2019. She has been hanging out with me this week while I studied for comps and started teaching online. 

In the afternoons, I usually take my laptop or a book to the bed and study, and a doll for company. Gertrude is sitting on my bed desk. I got her in 2015 from the Korean doll company Dollmore. She's a "Flocke" sculpt. Willow is sitting with my headphones. She's made by the Chinese company Angel of Dream. I got her in 2013. She's a "Qing" sculpt.

(Written last Wednesday.) I keep trying to express my feelings, but they only grow stranger. A tangled web of longing and horror, a three-fold reaction to my surroundings, my life and all that I am. It is such an intense thing I am feeling, oh, I wish I could get it out. I am stifled and too free at the same time. I am longing for the past, for darling dolls and being free and creative and to have life be so effortless. I long for that. I long for what wasn't real! A new chapter in my life. I am at the very threshold. I am being driven to insanity by this long blank in which I can do nothing. I am not putting much more into our present home, because pretty soon we will do a thorough cleaning and be done with it, and I can't do anything for our future home except make curtains and placemats, but even as I do I am cautioned by experience that it is not our home yet, the place for which I am sewing, and something could happen. In addition to impatience I have a real fear....

I am cold, tired and hungry but bleaker still are my spirits after going through 338 images of Irag on the Yahoo news page. I guess it is not the thing to do at 3 a.m. But I felt too anxious to read or work on Cambriel. Now my curiosity has been sated, and I know what is happening, but not why? What is so important to these people and to our government? Why won't anyone say it clearly? "And when the wars were over, no one could remember what they were about," said Ashley Wilkes. Now that I won those things from Ebay I am ready to work on Cambriel. I am excited but nervous about buying these things. I have never had a story that existed so much in the physical. It is thrilling when I buy or make the things I need for it, but I worry about spending such money over it.