"He has been back for three days, three days-- and I have not known-- he has not come to me. I counted each moment he was gone, and I spent the seven days my mind had generously alotted for his leave-taking in carefully-contained composure, bearing the pain and the endless amount of questions. It is too much-- it is too much to ask to treat me this way and go-- but I bore the seven days, and at the end of them I was on pins and needles with torment, absolutely certain that he too must be feeling this uncertainty even to the smallest degree-- and at the very least-- at least would have seen me, would have regarded me. See, he is in the next room-- look, these exchanges we have had-- this semblance of friendship. It is dust. My mind is rattled. I am mistaken-- I hallucinate-- I pretended friendship where it is not. I have arrayed myself beautifully, and what a parade of stupid nonsense I am."
I look out onto the yellow and brown vegetation beneath my window, at the castle-like buildings far away and wonder where do I lie in all of this? There was a time when I was unfettered. This was a time before I entered the working world, before I was independent. My heart was free as a bird when I was in college. I did not know what happiness I experienced in my creativity because I had never known different. In other aspects of my life I knew pain but my stories, sprung up lately from a gothic mist into an immersing Pre-Raphaelite painting, were a richness and the most beautiful thing I had ever known. That the most beautiful thing I knew to exist happened inside of me made me very happy, even though I didn't know it. Now I know the sun is setting, even though I can't see it, because the bank of brown, twisted trees and shrubs is lit gold, like a reflection from a golden chalice. Slowly, slowly it will fade until everything is a homogenous, uncertain gray. This is the nightma...