Where did they take you?
I don't know. I'm lying on a couch. I can smell the flowers on your table, the sourness of my own breath. I ache.
Yesterday, I fell down the stairs, heel slipping on loose carpet, pitching backwards, landing hard on my back, skinning my elbow, my wrist, knee bending hard the wrong way. I got up at the bottom of the stairs almost immediately, but I put a finger to a tender elbow and it came back wet and sticky and I am all bruise and swelling and the worst bruise of all, the bruise to my dignity, flying down the stairs like a senile old man. I feel age encroaching on me.
I am lonely. I live in a beautiful house in a beautiful place but I keep thinking, what is the point of me. Tonight, I'm going to see friends and watch Wales play England and lose and commiserate with them and I cannot tell any of them anything beyond the fact of my status, a blank expression of the now with no reflection.
And I will sit alone on my bed in the lowering darkness and I will be alone; and somewhere else, in a dream I sit alone on another bed in another darkness and guilt consumes me, and I do not know if the guilt or the loneliness is worse.
End of the First Part.
[Collected Writings Index]
