"We'll take up where we left off, Esther," she said, with her sweet martyr's smile. "We'll act as if all this were a bad dream."

   A bad dream.

  To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.    

   A bad dream.

   I remember everything.

   I remember the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig-tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a grey skull.

   Maybe forgotfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.

   But they were part of me. They were my landscape.

~ Sylvia Plath, The Bell jar