Helena Writes

Before sleep came, my thoughts floated with universes, and drifting off I felt the sweetness of certainty that even brutality could not destroy that quantum, transcendent reality...

I could bear them, I could bear the stars, bear to see the endlessness of them without fear—and the stars poured into me.

The first time I went to the house in the woods myself, I stood on the porch and watched a tree fall. I must have turned my head just in time...

It was as if my sister, who never had children of her own, waited for this child...

Anna Maria Alberghetti, the opera singer, turned up in our bunk on the last day of camp like something out of a dream.

I took Three-Dimensional Design again, three years later. Then, I was older than my classmates, and I knew why I was there...

The air was enchanted, electrified with what I can only call the love that moved between the four of us, who had experienced something so other than the war, of such a different order than a world of folly...

The ceilings in the studios had to have been 20 feet high. I loved the corner where I painted, lit by a tall, old window that was stuck closed with time...

Loving the campers was the given. We were in sync. I wasn’t, after all, that much older than they were. I could have passed for one of them, had I worn a camp uniform...

It lives inside me, no one but myself to corroborate what I saw. Until now, when at last I have committed that moment to the page...