I feel so...empty. Nothing seems to matter anymore. It's as if my eyes have been shrouded in a fog of apathy so that, in the words of playwright Edward Albee, I can't see anything "with pity, with affection...with anything but...a cruel disinterest." It's almost as if any emotion that I have carried with me has been interred in a tight vault.

I cried the other night. It was the first time in a few weeks. It was redemptive in that it was for no emotional issue but rather for my own physical suffering.

It's so difficult to look beyond my life as it is right now because of the uncertainty that results from my apathy. On the one hand, I really want to depart from where I was and move onto something/someone greater, but on the other hand, I'm not quite ready to move on.

This feeling is so complicated. I can tell that apathy is slowly seeping into my very being...I can feel it and see it in my writing. It's beginning to have an effect upon my physical countenance as well, for I do not approach things or people with such compassion or intrigue; even my own sensations--just scratching my nose just now--feel different, removed, as if I am not touching my own body but somebody else's. It's such a disenchanting feeling, particularly because it has ties to depression (regardless of the symptoms, I am not depressed).

But my writing has suffered most of all. The colorful and figurative language which used to imbue my style has faded, tarnished; it has grown ever more difficult to write in my own style.


And the worst part is that I know exactly from where this apathy springs. The passion that I once carried for a falsehood was given a strong reality check a few weeks ago. And now, it isn't even that I care about that passion anymore. That passion died violently last week or so. But with that death, a monstrous pragmatism came hurtling down upon me. The romantic part of my body, the one with lofty hopes and the one who loved so easily, has been severed from the rest of me. Irreparable damage. And this pragmatism, which so many value because it can keep one "reserved" or "realistic," is a painful dichotomy to the quixotic goals I once had to find a Dulcinea or a dragon...it has shown me there is no Dulcinea, only a whore; there is no dragon, only a windmill. It has sapped me of all romantic ideas so that all that remains is simply a general disdain for affection or love or caring.

Not even a newfound passion can vindicate me, for even if I do find one, it will be in vain; that passion cannot, through my new realistic point of view, be as...beautiful...as the Dulcinea I once thought I had found.

It's so strange, because so many people value pragmatism in romance and relationships (ah! what an oxymoron; pragmatism and romance!). But I see it as a curse, for without lofty goals, there is no hope. And without hope there is no optimism, and without that, no happiness.

I hate for this to sound as if I'm torn up inside. I have healed; it's the scar tissue that's the problem...it's the scars that have ruined my romance.

So where do I go from here? Not even God himself could know.