Disclaimer:
This piece is a piece of pure fiction based on the death of Virginia Woolf. It DOES NOT tackle any real pieces of information. Everything is deployed in the favour of dramatic effects. Her suicide note, as found on the internet, is quoted but nothing else can be considered as a real piece of information about the life or the death of Woolf.
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“Dearest,
I feel certain I
am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times.
And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t
concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me
the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone
could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible
disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life,
that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write
this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of
my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I
want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would
have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.
I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.
I don’t think
two people could have been happier than we have been.
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She wasn’t mad
as they called her, she was only a radical. She wasn’t a psycho as she was
accused, she was only insightful. She had her emotions heightened, only more
elegant and more refined than others’. She was an artistic human. She had no
voodoo mumbo jumbo going around in her life. She wasn’t an associate of the
devil. She wasn’t old. She wasn’t young. She wasn’t anything but some thoughts
that had a hard time getting explored. She was only a compilation of
suffocating words that she expressed through her handwriting on pieces of
parchments every time she had the urge to let something out. She loved her
husband, she wished if she could bear his child but she wasn’t so lucky. She
was dismal in her world. She lived in the agony of being a slave to her own
fantasies. The worlds that she created, through the words that should have been
her liberators, worked backwards. She was enslaved in her own freedom, a slave
to her own alternative life.
She had the
thought in her head that one should be different. She only failed in being so.
Not because she wasn’t different, but because she was too different from the
world that surrounded her. She was a radical, which categorized her as a rebel,
which she was, but also for which she was regarded as a curse to her life.
Growing more
dismal every day, growing desperate for the liberation she has always sought,
she gave up on the conventions that she wanted to reform. She decided to only
reform herself. The only way applicable is to embrace the fact that death is
the ultimate liberator from every squeaky, loud voice in her that is trying to
pull her from what she is towards what others think she should. She was even a
radical in the way she saw things, not only in the way she thought of them. She
didn’t only hold a new perspective, she also knew how she can act on her own.
That’s why she aroused anger during her time.
“It is only
another hardship another day in which I’m crazy. It’s only another day of
detachment in which I feel overthrown by the large waves that do not seem to
cease standing between my free spirit and my physical existence. If I am to be
free, I’m to give up my body, which will be a worthy price for my liberation.”
On another
dreary day, grey clouds and suffocating sunrays unable to penetrate through the
fog and mist that have taken over the atmosphere, she headed over to the sea.
She had her house, as vast as a grey palace, inhabited by the screams of her
heart and the shouts of her mind, and as artificial as the cold, extravagant,
white marble that had covered every inch of it, looking over the sea; her
savior and her doom. She has looked at it for every day of her very short long
life and has always pictured herself hugging its cold, comforting sand bed and
laying there forever. She used to look at its soothing, gentle waves from
above, from the balcony of her west wing, where she had protruding from the
body of the palace. Whenever she was there, she felt that she was standing on
the sea, in the middle of it; no directions, no right, no wrong; only
nothingness; only peace. Only this day, she had approached it through walking
on its shore with bare feet. She put on her raincoat, very heavy and very dark,
and filled its pockets with crushed pieces of white marble, along with sharp,
black stones. She carried in her pockets the screams that had drowned her every
day. She carried along her misery that has led her to despair. She has just
given up but a woman like her never goes down alone. She brought her murderer
along down with her.
"I wasn’t alone
in this. I had his smile in my head and his gentle eyes on my mind; I could see them as I walked into the water. I felt his lips pressing hard
against mine; bestowing on them a last kiss, and his hand placing my stranded locks of hair gently
behind my left ear."
She walked further and further and smiled harder and
harder until She disappeared in the vast water. She never came back up, neither
did she make any sound.
It was a quite death, just as the quite life
that others wanted me to have. Although my death has raised controversy and
debate, I had an eventful life, just as my fierce spirit. Along with my other "victories", the way I chose to die is the ultimate victory of all. It’s
just another way of saying I’ve lived to the fullest even when I was "wasted". I’m not wasted, I’m a phenomenon, I’m Virginia and that
was my death.
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