It is interesting that N has adopted (independently [of me]) a fatalistic flip side to my theory: Nothing is real until it is shared. While I would emphasize the fragile transcience¹ transience of creative thought and the need to commit things to paper if direct communication is not available, she would declare that bad things wouldn’t happen if you didn’t mention them. It isn’t just a simple aversion to ill-speaking, but rather, like I said, a type of fatalismm: if you imagine a bad thing, and share it, it can’t help but come true…

But let me write it down once and for all, stop dodging my [feelings], try to make some sense of what’s going on here. I am stupendously infatuated with [redacted], which, suffice to say, has completely up-ended my sanity. There’s really nothing I can do here that doesn’t carry the risk of calamity. I cannot, dare not, discern her feelings—it would be a lose-lose situation. Either she feels something and I am abandoning her, or she doesn’t, and I’m being an unremitting idiot.

I can’t win. (No, I’m bullshitting myself, but it can’t be that easy—how can it not be fraught with peril?) If I know, then I can decide to stay (but would I decide to stay?) I enjoy my sense of powerlessness too much. (Without any hope, I am free.)

Because: I can sense she doesn’t want to make me stay, though she tells me to stay anyway. For all I know, I could simply be an intellectual exercise for her, some sort of strange puzzle and I am too doubtful of my own self-worth to hope, even though I want to hope, how I wish I could stopper that feeling of that Thursday and just pretend, sometimes I just want to give up, let me drown in mindlessness.

Whou’d have thought that $10 could turn my life so topsy-turvy?

…

Oh can I again love someone as I did? Can I even start to reveal how she changed my life, how she made me feel human, alive, and inspired? How do I do this without sounding too cheesy and contrived?

If I had not met her that fateful May?

And maybe, you’re gonna be the one that saves me

Shit, I don’t know anything about love, and what it means to be there, to stand by someone, to know how to help someone achieve her dreams. I don’t know how to give in kind, to reciprocate, to give the hope that I have been given. What can I say or do that would touch her?

This is the thing that blocks it all, the plague which will still me in all my endeavors. I do not know how to read other people’s needs and wants. What kind of physician can I be? What kind of poet? What kind of lover? This is the utter stillness of my heart, unable to give without being told, oh if it would just come naturally, then she would know that I would give what I could give freely, expecting nothing in return, save what she has already given me. Can I not work for this? Am I doomed to unhappiness? Will imagination at last run out of ways out, and I will only surrender at last, let the shadows eat my heart until I’ve come to nothingness?

Please, let me hope, and if this hope must die, then please, do not let me swim long in despair. I have clutched at the sands of hope, solid ground under my feet, and I dread the coldness of that dark sea. If I cannot stay here, if I must swim again, I do not think I can long survive, do not think I can win back to the shore again.

I have felt the dark waters close over my head, [I have known] what the silence is, [known] what to expect, and if I cannot make a home upon this sandy shore, then I will accept my Fate [without] kicking and thrashing. We will all end up at the bottom of that Sea. It’s only a question of Time, but I had hoped it would be later, not sooner.