Member-only story
Emily Dickinson, Reclusive Belle of My Soul
A Taliswomen Short
1 min readJun 30, 2022
Where my first memory of Emily should be, there is instead a void. I try to find it, but it’s gone. I suspect that before I read a word she’d written, I’d heard that she was a crazy hermit who had the audacity to be a spinster. Maybe that’s why I loved her immediately; that’s the life I already foresaw for myself as a teenager. I was prescient.
Before that, when I was 8 or 9, I fantasized about an adult life lived alone. Oddly, I imagined I’d have a grand piano. It was actually an invented plot device that enabled me to meet my piano-tuning love interest.
Emily’s poetry was the first that seemed throbbing yet accessible to me. I could understand her luxurious wild nights, even if they were fantasy for us both.
