...of a teenage girl

That was the miscast summer of my barren youth which (for that short time, that short brief unreturning springtime of the female heart) I lived out not as a woman, a girl, but rather as the man which I perhaps should have been. I was fourteen then, fourteen in years if they could have been called years while in that unpaced corridor which I called childhood, which was not living but rather some projection of the lightless womb itself; I gestate and complete, not aged, just overdue because of some caesarean lack, some cold head-nuzzling forceps of the savage time which should have torn me free, I waited not for light but for that doom which we call female victory which is: endure and then endure, without rhyme or reason or hope of reward - and then endure; I like that blind subterranean fish, that insulated spark whose origin the fish no longeer remembers, which pulses and beats at its crepuscular and lethargic tenement with the old unsleeping itch which has no words to speak with other than ‘This was called light,’ that ‘smell,’ that ‘touch,’ that other something which has bequeathed not even name for sound of bee or bird or flower’s scent or light or sun or love - yes, not even growing and developing, beloved by and loving light, but equipped only with that cunning, that inverted canker-growth of solitude which substitutes the omnivorous and unrational hearing-sense for all the others: so that instead of accomplishing the processional and measured milestones of the childhood’s time I lurked, unapprehended as though, shod with the very damp and velvet silence of the womb, I displaced no air, gave off no betraying sound, from one closed forbidden door to the next and so acquired all I knew of that light and space in which people moved and breathed as I (that same child) might have gained conception of the sun from seeing it through a piece of smoky glass - fourteen, four years younger than Judith, four years later than Judith’s moment which only virgins know: when the entire delicate spirit’s bent is one anonymous climaxless epicene and unravished nuptial - not that widowed and nightly violation by the inescapable and scornful dead which is the need of twenty and thirty and forty, but a world filled with living marriage like the light and air which she breathes. But it was no summer of a virgin’s itching discontent; no summer’s caesarean lack which should have torn me, dead flesh or even embryo, from the living: or else, by friction’s ravishing of the male-furrowed meat, also weaponed and panoplied as a man instead of hollow woman.

[Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner, W.]