I try to forget remembrance past, admittedly futile but always worth one more try. I hit the sheets and tell myself, "This time it's going to work. I will sleep. I will myself to sleep."
I awake around 2:00 a.m., soaked to the bone. Still some residual fever from the flu, I guess. Dazed, I struggle in slow motion to free myself from a twisted, sodden sheet, grab my lump of a sweat-stained pillow and set feet to floor. Maybe I'll find a little relief sleeping standing up. Clearly, I'm not thinking clearly.
Stumbling through the debris of many days' inattention to my studio's general health, I pick my way blearily to the airless open window and pose momentarily at the sash. The yellowed, tattered wisps of some ancient lace curtain hang limp and motionless, framing in a view I've come to hate:
Me, myself and I reflect back from a conjured mirror of the soul. That green, naive whelp, that inveterate idealist . . .
My much older, wiser and jaded shell of spent humanity gazes downward through an opened pane of filthy glass.
I eye with menace my once youthful, scrubbed ruddiness and earnestness. Though dressed in somewhat worn hand-me-down threads, my tattered saintliness won over not a few souls. Little did I then realize that the inherent naturalness of youthful persuasion had been reeled in, unhooked and shoved into the creel of rigid and uncompromising uniformity. Unwittingly, I had been selling my own soul while winning over the souls of trusting men, women and children. From my enlightened vantage point I look back in time, I look down at my beautiful, young manhood. From an imagined darkened pane I see my reflection and despise what I have become. Strangely, a cool sense of tranquility washes over me as I come out of my reverie, my black reminiscence.
The vision of my youthful ideals embodied in vaporous shadow on the pavement below has evaporated. Gone for the moment but sure to return as an untold want, a want, a wish for explanation why it all went so wrong. Yet, wrong by whose interpretation? I learn to shut it out, shut out the noise in the head called irrational thought, excessive thinking that leads only to depression, if not, eventually, to insanity.
I pull away from the window, shut it tight against the chilly predawn air, and forget my dark reflection. It's only a phantom, scarcely the real me. A walk in the moonlight will do me good. I will see my inner turmoil in a new light, the softly suffused illumination della bella luna. The black shadow of the walking dead, cast upon the asphalt by the gracious moon, will be my companion.