she smelled of rosemary and cloves and had those sun-dazzled klonopin eyes

and leaves in her hair in the wind and finding connexions between the books she has been falling in love with, and without a pen, tenderly marking the pages with ash. her books will smell of cloves now, too. as if the words have life only in those pages. as if.

'You write, I suppose.'

'No,' Oliviera said. 'What could I write about, in order to do that you have to have some certainty that you've lived.'

'Existence precedes essence,' Morelli said with a smile.

'If you want to put it that way.'

the world cleaves about into ten thousand translucent planes. truth and untruth. hunger and fullness. writing and blankness. fiction and non. stories we write to entertain and stories we write to believe in.


i don't trust myself anymore. i am all of a fiction. i don't know where my planes intersect. the elusivity of my truths is just as damning as my desperate need to define them.

fear of the dark is fear of fear itself, or so i've heard

more and more i fear the night, the darkness, the darkness in the night. it creeps in at my seams and latches on to the darkness in my head. i become a trembling mess of tears and shakes and cigarettes smoked under streetlights, greedy for illumination. i need to see the world to know it's still there as it was. that there are no monsters under the bed.

i am afraid of spaces in the dark and darkness in spaces and whether, in the dark, my feet will remain bound to the earth or if i'll go flying off. sometimes i'm afraid i won't.

i wake before dawn in coils of sweat and fear and last remnants of too many dreams and still there is not sun yet, still this endless clutching dark. this morning i napped at 6h45 until 8, woke in fear that the warm light splashed across my lap was not real, was fading into night again. let the alarm go off for an hour before i could grasp hold of the day.

there's safety in sunlight and oranges and cereal and i am afraid of dying in every myriad way. i am afraid of the years of my life i had apparently specifically not thought about until yesterday. i am afraid of what might be buried there, what i have done. but there is that oedipus thing, that insatiable human curiosity to know, and i am just as afraid to not find out. maybe there's nothing there. maybe that's the Nothing i'm afraid of.