There would be days when

There would be days when I feel heathen, friendless, like Cain driven out of Eden to the edge of the earth, eschewed from the company of men, and I feel an utter shame. Shame, that social thing again. I am a bad strategist. Too many bridges cut before I could cross them. But maybe that is really what I wanted all along. To be an island unto myself. To be cut out from it all. All social relations artifice -- to survive in an artificial world. 

I will make no noise! I will do no harm! Said Plath. I will be quiet, I will be courteous and resolute, said Susan. Too late for that now. Such graciousness is not useful to me. Long have I been dragging my entrails behind me. I should be glad I did not have distended uterus.

Technically speaking I should be dead. Politically speaking I should be long dead. When friends see me,  they ask how come I am still alive. I cannot tell them that even to me it is a miracle without sounding like God was with me all along. But a miracle it is that I still manage to thieve along the precipices of the sewers like that stinky rat of Patrick Chamoiseau in that Granta edition Germie ceveted so much. The rat. The child. Who grew up obsessed with catching that rat and ended up crying for the rat when he was an adult, having grown old and shrunken, the rat not the child, stealing a life that never became his.