Fear.

"As a girl, she dreamed about having a silent home, just to herself, the way other women dreamed of their weddings. Instead of collecting lace and linen for her trousseau, the young woman buys old things from the thrift stores on grimy Milwaukee Avenue for her future house-of-her-own---faded quilts, cracked vases, chipped saucers, lamps in need of love.

"...The daughter claimed that she had been taught that a writer needs quiet, privacy, and long stretches of solitude to think. The father decided too much college and too much gringo friends had ruined her. In a way he was right. In a way she was right. When she thinks to herself in her father's language, she knows sons and daughters don't leave their parents' house until they marry. When she thinks in English, she knows she should've been on her own since eighteen.

"...At the end of the evening she finds herself searching for a ride home. She came on the bus and [he] offers to give her a lift home. But she's not going home, she's got her heart set on a movie that's showing only tonight. She's afraid of going to the movies alone, and that's why she's decided to go. Because she's afraid.

"...What is the woman in the photograph afraid of? She's afraid of walking from her parked car to her apartment in the dark. She's afraid of the scuffling sounds in the walls. She's afraid she'll fall in love and get stuck living in Chicago. She's afraid of ghosts, deep water, rodents, night, things that move too fast---cars, airplanes, her life. She's afraid she'll have to move back home again if she isn't brave enough to live alone.

"...I meet Norma Alarcon. She is to become one of my earliest publishers and my lifetime friend. The first time she walks through the rooms of [my] apartment on North Paulina, she notices the quiet rooms, the collection of typewriters, the books and Japanese figurines, the windows with the view of freeway and sky. She walks as if on tiptoe, peering into every room, even the pantry and closet as if looking for something. 'You live here...' she asks, 'alone?'

'Yes.'

'So...' she pauses, 'How did yo do it?'

Norma, I did it by doing the things I was afraid of doing so that I would no longer be afraid. Moving away to go to graduate school. Traveling abroad alone. Earning my own money and living by myself. Posing as an author when I was afraid, just as I posed in that photo you used on the first cover of Third Woman. "

---Sandra Cisneros, from the introduction to the 25th Anniversary edition of her book, The House on Mango Street.