I’m sitting on a bed in one of the rooms at the Marina Inn – there is something stifling in the air, like a waft of heat that just won’t go away. I wonder if it’s the air around me, or the air in the room, for I feel sick, I feel incoherent, I feel irrelevant. I feel like meaning has escaped my body and I’m wondering why I’m still alive. I want to stop fighting – because I don’t know what I’m fighting for. I don’t know what I want. I just know I’m exhausted – I’m sick – I’m ill – I’m alone. No one cares about me, because no one cares about anything besides themselves. Period. I just want this to be over with, but I don’t know what “this” is.

I just want, for once, K to be on my side, for real. I just want K to be my family and not my family-in-waiting. Perhaps that is a tall order. Perhaps I’m asking too much. Perhaps I know this was never made to last, and it’s way past its expiration date. I think about suicide. But I don’t know if that’s what I want to do. I feel like I’m stuck in purgatory, between Earth and Hell. I’m fighting too hard to prove myself worthy, I’m fighting too hard to not want what I want. I’m fighting too hard to realize the dreams of my childhood. Love. Dignity. Family. Faith. Nothing’s real anymore – I don’t know what I’m living for, fighting for. I’m just living, trudging along, and every step of the way, I feel like I’m losing a little bit of myself, a little bit of my faith.

Am I going crazy? What should I do? I feel like I don’t have a right to want what I want. Is K at fault? Am I at fault? Or, is it just that life just never pans out? Would we have been okay if we went ahead and had the baby – instead of killing it? Is the baby, who remains sexless, the reason a part of me is dead? That it’s never the same? I feel like I no longer harbor any hopes of ever having any family. All I see is black, pitch black. My hope has died. My faith has dried up. My love has diffused in the winds of change.