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The more splendid it gets out there, the darker I get inside.

Friday afternoon at its breezy, beautiful zenith, and I'm sitting here inside, pounding away at this computer - not because I'm getting important stuff done - I'm not - but I just can't bear to be out and about, and I'm not really keen on seeing anyone right about now. Why these moods? Why this black dog (Churchill's evocative term for depression - I don't know any better description of it)? Why now, when everything is exploding into bloom like this?

As I said in a prior post, maybe it wasn't a bright idea for me to be reading Werther last night - not if I wanted to be uplifted, anyway. (For the record, I didn't want to be.) Funny, I noticed last night how the epistolary style (plain english - the story is primarily told in a series of letters) is more than a little bloggish - being that someone has already converted Pepys' diaries into a blog, could the Livejournal of Young Werther be that far off? Maybe someone a little more industrious than me has already gotten to it. Wouldn't be surprised. (That there are people more industrious than me. And that it's already been done).

That archetypal storyline: A hypersensitive, mercurial, foppishly absurd young man (German, of course) dissatisfied with himself, those around him, and his failures in art and love drifts aimlessly, returns to the place of his upbringing only to be reminded of how his youthful hopes and dreams were so much folly, loses his daemon and his mind in the pursuit of la belle dame sans merci, and finally, in a fit of desperate, hopeless passion, blows his brains out. The parallels are a little striking.

No. Not exactly. I couldn't do that. I could never do that, and there shouldn't be one person thinking I could or would. I'm not there and never will be. Perhaps in those sturm und drang days, you could lay a duelling pistol (borrowed from your rival, and cleaned carefully by your beloved, both unaware of your plans for it) against your temple and consider it Romantic. Those were the days! But what do we have here, now? Nothing so stylish. Taking a walk in front of the West Virginia Secondary in the middle of the night, maybe. No. I could not and would never do that. I've never even been close. Certainly not now.

Still things die, and parts of you die, and they fall away. This I believe in; I am prone to forming these concepts. During the last few months of my undergrad career in England, I realized, to my horror, that I was going to have to come back to the US. There was no way around it, or I wasn't imaginative or daring enough to come up with one - I supposed I could have scrapped and starved, but that has never been me. In the last few months I envisioned myself as having almost split into two people over the course of four years; the one who had grown up in the Connecticut suburbs and returned twice a year, only to feel that strange sensation of being a fish out of water in his own home, and the pleasantly detached expatriate, belonging neither here nor there, content, if not happy, to drift.

Happiness did not enter into it.

When I did go back, it was the latter that slowly, agonizingly succumbed. That one suffocated.

I found out a few nights ago that the one I really loved, the one I really believed I was going to spend the rest of my life with, whom I stayed with through impulsive infidelity, through the birth of her child, through a life-threatening disease, the one whom I finally lost, try as hard as I might to hold on to her - that she met someone last weekend. She's well within her rights. We're over, that was her choice, what she needed to do to get better. But I am overwhelmed all the same now.

It is really really really over with us, and so is a part of me. Last night I felt my chest get tight again, that suffocating feeling. Today, too. Something inside me drying up and falling away. Sitting here in a place that suits me just fine for now and yet at the same time somehow feels like a trap, the longer I stay here without a break. I have been here in this little town since January without so much as a weekend away, and there's no chance of having one anytime soon; I'm living hand to mouth as it is. I could not be more content in the sense of being surrounded by these books, these words, these thoughts others have and I have...trying to figure out the puzzle without an image to go by, and then put it all together. I could not be less hopeful, or more dismissive, of just about any other sort of happiness here.

I walk around taking quite a few pictures now, because words largely fail me.