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         My mind seemed muddier than ever as I crossed the bridge. I kicked a twig, and looked left out over the city. My books were heavy in my bag.
         For many people, seeing the city brings a sense of calm, serenity, or an appreciation of human life and workings of society. But viewing the skyline brought me no pleasure—only a heightened sense of loathing for people and life in general.
         Setting my bag down, I pulled out my copy of The Bell Jar. I’d read it a dozen times before, but every time I understood it more. “I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.” I placed the thin ribbon back in my page and slid into a sitting position against the side of the bride, letting my head fall back against the concrete.
         When other people read that passage, they think the tears are of weakness, based on how fragile the character is. I did too at first. Now I understand that the tears are of anger, passion, frustration, hate, fear, and confusion. I know. I know because I have cried like that too. Simply sat on the floor many times, and, realizing that this life was my life, the only life I knew and the only life I’d ever know, my chest would buckle in in defeat and small gasps and whimpers would spill from my lips as I cried from sheer helplessness at being trapped in this too, too solid flesh.
         Half the time it seemed like I was under the Bell Jar too—trapped in a small chamber where I couldn’t breathe and was only able to look out through the thick glass and glimpse a garbled world. The only way out of the Bell Jar is to break it, and if that means shattering the distorted image through the glass that is reality, then I can see why one would gladly do it.
         I put the book back in my bag, and pushed the skin under my eye to let the tear roll out. Standing up, I looked remorsefully back over the city. Not today.
         When I got home, my parents weren’t back yet. I settled on the sofa to do my homework, but ended up with a page tattooed with mindless doodles. Didn’t matter to me.
         Instead I turned sideways, laying across the couch with my head on my book bag. “Death must be so beautiful.” The Bell Jar whispered to me. “To have no yesterday and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.” I closed my eyes and let out an uneven breath, as this was not the first time the book had spoken to me like this. I turned my head, repositioning it on the book bag.
         “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”  Another of my tears fell and I was helpless. My lips, mouth and nose twitched, my eyebrows contorted, my breath caught and I wanted to shatter my bell jar.
         I put Sylvia Plath’s book back on its shelf and went back to my couch and bag. A new book’s voice whispered to me. “To be or not to be?” it asked.
         “That is the question.” I said by means of answer, as my father entered.
         Hamlet didn’t answer now that we had company, and my father tilted his head confusedly. “What is the question?”
         “Oh nothing.” I murmured.
         “Then stop lying on the couch like that. You have a bed for rest, and there’s no reason for you to use a chair for anything other than its original purpose.” He put is coat up and  promptly left to write something for work.
         I was dying to scream after him, “Then tell me what my purpose is!”
          Why did a couch get a simple purpose, a reason for existing? “The trouble was,” The Bell Jar told me. “I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.”
         I let myself sink further into my bed, crushing my chest to the mattress. I kept breaking apart. My soul felt trapped, my mind tortured. Another tear sank into my pillow. “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”  There was still red on my pocket knife. “I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.” 
         I looked up at the frame on the wall, an oil painting of calm water reflecting the trees and sky. Each leaf was detailed, the sky perfectly rendered, and the painting seemed like a photograph. Only then, after years of seeing that painting daily, I realized what it actually meant. I was the water, and the trees were life. I mirrored life so closely, no one suspected I was nothing more than an illusion. I, the water, sat perfectly still, crushed under life, and maintained the same image, though the reflection was solely on the top, while under the surface lay the dark and muddy depths, forever caught in an unknown current. However, my façade only remained impenetrable so long as nothing disturbed the surface. Even a moth skimming the glassy water could instigate a hurricane. I was the water, and I couldn’t even remember what it was like to be land. More tears sprang from my liquid soul.
         Suddenly a loud beeping cut through my tears and my hand shot out to silence the alarm. It was time to go back to school. Odd, I thought. It wasn’t just that I didn’t remember falling asleep, but I didn’t remember sleep at all, or even waking up. It was as if I had lain there all night and let my tears run down my face. The Bell Jar greeted me, “I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.”
         Dragging myself upright, I approached the most offensive part of my room. I roughly forced my face away from it, getting dressed without looking anywhere in particular. But turning to leave the room, I couldn’t block her out anymore.
         I saw a girl staring at me. She was my height, with dark black hair to the base of her jaw, and pained black-brown eyes, and every bit of her being repulsed me. The way her lip curved, the way she moved her eyes, her fidgets and habits. Her entire existence and everything about her irked me to the degree of near-madness. Her unwelcome intrusion drove me to such madness I hurled my fist at her face wanting to kill her, break her, hurt her, smash her.
         But my knuckles met the glass of my mirror. My chest contracted again, squeezing the air from my lungs in a short, pained exhale. I would have cried again if I hadn’t looked down at my hand, where the skin over two knuckles had broken and begun to bleed slightly.  It stung. Through my tear-filled mouth, I smiled. That loathsome girl deserved the pain.
         “Honey? Did you drop something? What was that noise?” my mother’s voice came from the other side of the door. I quickly slung my bag up onto my shoulder, keeping my hand on the strap and thus out of sight, and opened the door, spewing some excuse about dropping a text book. The accursed mirror remained unharmed.
         I entered the kitchen, where I quickly occupied myself washing dishes so as not to be questioned further or talked into breakfast. Not eating would starve that hateful girl in the mirror, cause her pain, and, I hoped, maybe break her reflection.
         The front door closed behind me and I all but ran from my so-called “home”.  I doubted I’d ever be at home anywhere but books, and never in that godforsaken house with those godforsaken people.
         By the time I was two blocks away, I slowed to a trot and then to a walk, watching the mottled shadows under my feet. “I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.” Came the familiar voice from my bag. I agreed.
         I walked.
         When I reached the bridge, I had to stop. The voices coming from my bag had become stronger and louder as I had neared it, and now they refused to be ignored any longer.  My Bell Jar compressed around me, and I was suffocated by the small space and tight air. I sank back into a niche in the wall of the bridge, still on land, and freed the books from their bag.
         “…take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?” the prince of Denmark suggested.
         “…because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”
         “To die.” Hamlet mused.
         “I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks.”
         “To sleep.”
         I looked back over the edge of the bridge, down such a great way, and  my bell jar loosened for a second. “The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.” I turned my whole body to face the side of the bridge.
         It had felt so good, that momentary freedom, the lifting of my bell jar. In my mind’s eye I saw myself falling, the bell jar left on the bridge far above, and in one last second, hearing Sylvia Plath calling back after me, “How free it is, you have no idea how free.”
         The pages of The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, caught and tore on the branches by the side of the road, landing in a ditch. The book lay there, the white pages stained brown and sprawled like broken birds wings.
         It called back one last thought, accusing and mocking my cowardice. “But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.”
         I turned from the broken book on the side of the road and strode away, agreeing with it one last time.