My room is like the ninth circle of hell, lacking only the frozen lake of the betrayers. I'm waiting for the icicles to form on the ceiling, for my limbs to go numb and fall off.

I am not having a good day.

I hate memorization, I do not have the mind for it. My memory is a selectively permeable membrane that captures useless oddities - a litany of dates, the way things smelled, how I've been wronged - and carries only the essence of the important things. I want to know things, to be brilliant, to not feel always a step behind, but it is hopeless. I read, I read, I read, but I will never know all the things there are to know, for every book I finish I have a half dozen waiting on the bookshelf. They stare at me now, stiff-backed, spines straight and uncreased and watchful. Pick me next, they all say. We are only paper, glue, ink, we will someday crumble away. I smelled the pages of my Chaucer text to day, it smelled of summers and of a childhood I'm forgetting.

I hate days like this. I want an off switch for my brain. I want a vaccination against these thoughts, to poison them away. Despair has not been with me for a long time now, but the memory sits in the front row always. Remember me. I can't forget. I can drown you. I know, I know, and I have never been strong or brave enough to stop you. You will drown me at night, when I won't know which way the surface is. You will, you have.

I don't want to live always with this crippling, paralyzing fear of a danger I can't touch or fight, but I do not know any other way to live, yet.