Fantasia on a “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” after Sylvia Plath by Kaitlin Kan

               ​Alexey Gaponov CC



Fantasia on a “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” after Sylvia Plath

But I grow old and forget your name. They said there would be memory problems afterward, though I didn’t expect the brain-aching strain to fill the moments of my autobiography. They could obliterate those parts of me that preyed upon itself--that saw nooses in scarves and kitchens full of weapons--with an induced seizure; I would be asleep, there would be no pain until waking weeks later in a bed other than my own with little to show for the past year. I can pick out stars in the void from photographs representing a memory frozen in pixel rather than flesh. And then there are the memories that are only mine, the ones I often wonder if I made them up inside my head. 

​And then there are the memories you cannot forget no matter how high a voltage they use--the bodies ridden with gangrene, the blood shed after a rape, the rapid slipping of sanity. Tricks of the brain woven in exquisite patterns with truth to create a terrifyingly imaginative tapestry of the mad girl’s mind. This is the realm of God and seraphim and Satan’s men, dancing in roundels that emblazon and poison even the sharpest wits, fabricating ghouls in the common man on the street and sparkles of bloodthirst in the eyes of a lover. I know I made you up inside my head, but it is the inside of my head that speaks to me in tongues of truths unheard. There’s a pill I take to put the imagination to sleep, a little green one at night before bed. The pain still lives within of the world’s unkindness, but the ghouls hide themselves. And I realize--I made it up inside my head. 

The arbitrary blackness from the needle in the crook of my elbow, that silencing sting, still lives in memories unreturned. I took a trip to Japan with my family over New Year’s that year, though amounting now to only snapshots in a dormant layer of recollection; I have a picture wearing a blue kimono--how I tear at my hair in the desperation of evoking the touch of the kimono sleeves on my wrists, the embrace of the sash, only to come face to face yet again with that arbitrary blackness. It is the blackness behind my eyes, too, that drives me quite mad; the backdrop of gods unseen with their scalpels and electrodes paring away the rot of the brain until I am numbed of the numbness and the little souvenirs of my lifetime of madness--an afternoon with a friend in a gallant city romp, familial moments, the little breadcrumbs that might have led me to wholeness, all swept up into darkness, leaving me only with what I make up inside my head. 

But the poets have taught us that there is romance in loneliness, in dancing moonstruck, naked in the winter chill as the body becomes the keeper of madness and memory when the brain can no longer bear. I plant a kiss on my own hand in remembrance of loves unremembered, evoking the softness of touch that now encircles me in a loving cycle of skin against skin. The only pleasure I have is the pleasure I can ignite within myself, the longing I possess to fondle my own breasts as I seduce myself with the erasure of others. 

I grow old and forget your name, but the body remains nameless. It is quite mad to be so madly in love with yourself, but as the unkind world waltzes in and out of the imagination, we hold each other in the fear within and in the arbitrary blackness without (or, perhaps, it could be the other way around). For to love is to know and to know is to touch, and to touch is to know that I didn’t make it up inside my head.    

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Kaitlin Kan is a student at Yale University studying literature and psychology. Hailing from the suburbs of Philadelphia with Chinese ancestry, her writing draws from rich cultural ties, as well as from my extensive experiences with mental illness. She is currently working on a poetry chapbook exploring the intersections between storytelling and corporeality

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