December 29, 2003

Winter is my time of despair. Shadows of doubt slipped into my mind today as I was waiting for my bus in the rain. Everything inside me is dead, my doubts whispered. All is nothingness, they echoed in the emptiness of my skull. And at the sound of those whispers all my splendid plans and vain ambitions collapsed upon themselves. There, in the bus station, I once more felt alone and naked with my doubts.

Sometimes it’s good to be free of illusions …

Almost two years ago I started systematically destroying all parts of myself that seemed to matter. This was after Barbara’s death when I was yearning for punishment and penance. The destruction was vicious and fairly successful: my mind and my schoolwork both fell in shambles, and for a moment I felt real. But like cockroaches after a nuclear blast, my dreams re-emerged and new life with new illusions formed from the rubbles.

Since then I’ve been busily manufacturing a new existence. It’s satisfying to construct a new reality to mask the absence of reality, and for a while life was sweet. But today, in the bus station, my doubts resurfaced to remind me that beneath the carefully constructed veneer there’s only dirt and a tinge of cruelty.

Cruelty. The close friend I sent to the steps of the mental asylum wrote me a warm good-bye letter two days ago. I made him run from my life, trembling in his own loneliness. I wrote him back, and now I feel indescribably empty. His departure shattered some of my illusions about myself: friendship, loyalty, love …

I’m now hanging in the balance, unsure which way to go. On one hand, I can abandon my illusions and embrace the living ruins of the past. On the other hand, I can embrace my new, exuberant life filled with sound and fury to see where it will take me. My mind is spinning and spinning, waiting for an accident to point the way.

Someone renumbered the platforms at the bus station. Too distracted to notice, I got on a different bus, and after ending up on the wrong side of town I walked through the rain for an hour before reaching home.