...you know it all by heart...

...why are you standing in one place?....

Fear, I think. Not so much the uncertainty principle, but rather ramifications. Outcomes. And I'm tired, too. There are things burning beneath my skin, and I can't define them. It frustrates me, hungers me, thwarts me. Words become suspicious in their inadequacy. The silence, sacred though it is, offers little in the way of wisdom, or comfort. Or, if it is offering something, it seems more like mockery than clarity.

I feel...disloyal. Anti-social. Angry. Lonely. Sad. Yet those feelings are ineffectual. Nominal. I crave the numinous, the feathering tips of water, the voiceless song of fire. I need to define this indescribable feeling, or it owns me. And I don't know that I want this feeling - how I'm feeling now - to own me. I'm afraid it won't teach me anything other than fear and infertile silence.

I want to go home tonight and lock myself away, not leave again until I have to go to work tomorrow. I'll turn off the lights, save one lamp, light candles, and read, listen to music - surround myself with inanimate but worthy sources of comfort and wisdom.

...but a promise made is a promise to keep: I'll go over to my friend's house tonight, watch a little TV with her, before retreating home, to ponder and agonize, to fret and thwart the blazing heart, the burning mind, the useless flesh. Sometimes I wish I weren't a born-and-bred sadist: I suddenly appreciate the usefulness of self-flagellation, the purification that comes from the mortification of the flesh. And I can't help but think I could find some...answer, some relief in that practice. But the only such mortification that I've found is to sleep, or self-denial of pleasure.

And I crave nothing but solitude.