I awake each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounds and as impossible as it actually is, happy. And during the course of each day my heart descends from my chest into my stomach. By early afternoon I am overcome by the feeling that nothing is right, or nothing is right for me, and by the desire to be alone. By evening I am fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of my grief, alone in my aimless guilt, alone even in my loneliness. I am not sad, I repeat to myself over and over, I am not sad. As if I may one day convince myself. Or fool myself. Or convince others -- the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because my life has unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it has become an empty white room. I will fall asleep with my heart at the foot of my bed, like some domesticated animal that is no part of myself at all. And each morning I will wake with it again in the cupboard of my rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon I am again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, ... someone else ... somewhere else. I am not sad.
