What a beautiful day.  The brilliant sun dozes every few moments behind monumentally huge cruise-ship clouds, and even though it is 90 degrees outside, and a thousand percent humidity, my apartment is freezing cold.  I once had frost on the outsides of my windows.  I haven't been outside, and I don't plan on it except to get to the slave pit where I work.  Still, I appreciate the intermittent reprieves in harsh brightness because, even inside, it gives my aching, morbid photosensitivity a break. 

Just ate my fistful of miracles—those brightly colored capsules and tablets that saved my life.  I am ambivalent about this.  Some days ago I rescinded my prayer to die, but only briefly.  People are perplexed by my depression, though I hesitate to assign it such a pat and restrictive label.  Depression is a vast and gorgeous land, its beauty severe, its substances quite distinct; the solids are hard, and everything else is empty.  Very little moves.  It is a kind of peaceful place, though the isolation has lead some to hysteria, myself included, once or twice. 

Two days ago, I told someone I can't wait to die; I was not in a jovial mood.  He replied, "Ohhh, don't die, Joe."  I said, with venemous sarcasm, which he did not deserve, "I was not aware that that was an option."  Some people are perplexed by my depression, I among them. 

I'd be a different thing if I weren't so scared.  Fear, and my subservience to it, is what motivates my exile, it is what keeps me on the outskirts of life where there is no city, no commerce, no clan or tribe or society; where there is no arable land, where the bedrock meets the air.  In the haze of human inter-relationship, it's the nuances that confound me.  It's the subtleties of human interaction that, no matter how benign, lead always into conflict. 

I come close to you, I touch your face.  I give you a smile.  And then you are consumed in a vapor—a cloud of unknowing.  It seems the inevitable result of getting close to you, like flying through a cloud.  You looked like someone I wanted to get into, and when I did you became mist on the windshield, the teardrops of a dream.  So, I don't get close anymore.  If I do admire, I do it only from a distance. 

I have about a hundred names on my instant messenger contact list, about twenty are active, I watch as they come and go.  Some are there because I fell in love with their photograph, sometimes they are online.  A couple are there because I fell in love with their real live face.  I haven't seen them online yet.