When you learn to love yourself through another person, can you ever be complete on your own? I said I need to be free, I long to be me again, I must embrace what scares me the most. Here I am, facing my own reflection in deserted rooms. Shadows of the past will come to hunt you no matter how far you run.

My decision. My decision…It wasn’t supposed to be that hard. I’ve tried pretty much everything: weeks of solitary confinement, endless hours of analysis with friends, altered states of consciousness, desperately clinging to whatever came along, turning common events into tragedies just to keep my mind focused on the present.

Months have passed; I’m still trapped behind impermeable walls; the silence is deafening. Nothing to wait for, no one to share those countless little things that remain unspoken. Will we ever be innocent again, so open to life’s thrills and beauties and dangers? Growing up is all about building your defences.

And will I ever shut up? Look at me, such a lost case: a loving misanthrope, an innocent deceiver, a romantic whore…