Leap Year

"I don't want to interrupt a good party, but I want to say thank you to my husband. I want to say, May you never steal, lie, or cheat. But if you must steal, then steal away my sorrows. And if you must lie, lie with me all the nights of my life. And if you must cheat, then please cheat death, because I couldn't live a day without you."

--Leap Year (2010)

Bride to her husband at her wedding. I wrote these lines down when I was watching the movie again. They're true. Any bride would want all this from her husband--because she has no misgivings about him. 

The Blind Assassin

I looked at myself in the mirror, wondering, What is it about me? What is it that is so besotting? The mirror was full-length: in it I tried to catch the back view of myself, but of course you never can. You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else--to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don't know--because in a mirror your own head is always cranked around your shoulder. A coy, inviting pose.

--Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

Atwood is so original, so Canadian. There is no reason to stop reading any of her work. It is almost as if she knows, in her writing, that you will keep reading her. 

My first poem I officially analyzed and wrote an expository essay on was Sylvia Plath's "Mirror." Atwood here reminds me of that poem. That nameless woman looking into another, almost falling into her, colliding. But in Iris there is something different. Searching, innocent. How did Richard look at her back? She must constantly have felt that she was being watched. Unknowingly, uncannily. It must have been daunting, to always feel that you are watched, objectively but like a voyeur, subjectively but like a critic. How did she manage to live with a man like Richard, I would never grasp. For her father, for his money. Not for herself. And in the end, what did she salvage? Neither her father nor his money. But Laura, whom Iris would lose anyway.