Serein.

Sometimes I look at my life and all I see is blackness, a blank tablet dotted with isolated moments of joy shining like buoys along the horizon. Guides they are, promising safe passage, promising protection from sandbars hidden just below the surface of the unknowable sea. Other times the outlook is bleak, sorrow spreading like this cancer in my immune system, replacing marrow and lymph until I can no longer heal myself. I am nothing but bloody noses and bruises, poison in my veins.

Sometimes the poison is contagious.

"You want them, I know you do."

"I'm not discussing this with you."

"But you do."

"It's a moot point. It doesn't matter what I do or do not want."

Sometimes you spend your whole life pining for something you can't have, and for what? Another reminder of how happy you could be? How happy you were? How you'll never be happy again? It's a silly business this, and anyway I was never very good with numbers, too dyslexic to add up all the negative integers. When I was a kid I was sentenced to extra math homework, parents and teachers alike too disappointed in me to notice that I couldn't see, that I was all jumbled up inside. And now that we all know how broken I am, what? Now what? You kick a girl while she's down is what.

It's done nothing but rain here of late, and so tomorrow I'm flying into a blizzard. Seems about right.