Silence emerges from the sound of the rain and spreads in a swelling of gray monotony over the narrow street I contemplate.
 I’m sleeping while awake, standing by the window, leaning against it.

It’s raining hard, harder, still harder…It’s as though something were going to collapse in the blackness outside.

Seattle’s uneven mountainous mass looks to me today like a plain, a plain covered by rain.
All around, as far my gaze reaches, everything is the pale color of rain.

The falling threads of darkly luminous water stand out from the grimy building facades. I don’t know what to think or what I am.

I’m full of odd sensations, all of them cold. Right now it seems to me that the landscape is all a fog, and that the buildings are the fog that hides it.

A fascination born of what I’ll be when I no longer exist seizes my body and soul. An absurd remembrance of my future death sends a shiver down my spine. In the fog of my intuition, I feel like dead matter fallen in the rain and mourned by the howling of the wind. The chill of what I won’t feel gnaws at my thoughts.

To be something, anything, that doesn’t feel the weight of the rain outside or the anguish of inner emptiness.

To wander without thought or soul.
To be lost in landscapes of paintings, just a colored non-existence in the background. Into the far distance, irrevocably immersed.

A part of the sky  hidden from my view is clearing. Memory faintly flows between who I am and what I was. Everything around me is either departing or crumbling. 

I’m grieved by a feeling that I can’t place. I forget. I don’t see. I don’t think. I write these carelessly written lines not to say this and not to say anything, but to give my distraction something to do.

I have no other real pleasure besides  the morbid dribbling of slight sensations at the brink of collapse. I don’t speak the language of any reality, and I stagger amongst everyday life like an amnesiac who finally gets up after being bedridden for months.

The afternoon eventually comes to a monotonous and rainless close, in an uncertain and despondent tone of light. Thick drops of left over rain could still be heard falling on the rooftops. A fine dust of miniature diamonds hangs in the air.


I’m liberated and lost.
I feel. I shiver with fever. I’m I.

In the light morning fog of mid-spring, the downtown area wakes up and the sun rises lazily. The first signs of movement dot the streets with each pedestrian standing out distinctly.
Up above hazy figures can be seen stirring in the few open windows.

I drift without thoughts or emotions, just sense impressions.
I observe as if in reverie.
The fog that’s disappearing outside seems to be seeping into me.

-

For a long time - I’m not sure if for days or for months - I haven’t really recorded any impressions.
I don’t think, therefore I don’t exist.  I’ve forgotten who I am. Through some oblique sleep, I’ve become someone else.  To realize I don’t remember myself means that I’ve woken up. 

I return to myself without remembering what I’ve been, and the memory of what I used to be suffers after being cut off from my life. I have cloudy impressions of a mysterious interlude; part of my memory is trying to find the other part in vain. I can’t pull myself together. If I’ve lived during this time, I forgot to be aware of it.
Somewhere within this interlude of lost things there is a pale trace of useless memories. Abstract imagery and symbols. Colors.
No. It’s more painful than that.

It’s an intense melancholy of trying to remember what can not be recalled. An anguish over what my consciousness has lost among the seaweed and debris along the shores of who knows where. 

-
(Anonymous caress of slumber.)

Church bells strike what I know must be eight o’clock. The noise of the day rises with the bells. I awaken from myself because of the banality of measured time, a border to contain the abstract, a boundary around the unknown.  I notice the fog which has entirely quit the air has indeed penetrated the depths of my soul. I’ve lost the vision of what I was seeing. I’ve begun to perceive things with the banality of knowledge.

The cold light of the morning now glimmering like an apocalyptic torment.
What I see is no longer reality. Just life. An image in the absolute.

I turn and walk slowly, though faster than I think, to the door that will lead me back up to the hotel.  Advancing slowly, lifelessly, and my vision is no longer mine. Memory no longer anything but a nothingness that breathes. A deep forgetting that massages the tissues of my soul.

Inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper.
---

The not-cold, but not-warm spring sunrise glided over the few houses dotting the hills at the edge of the city. It fell between buildings, in alternating patches of light and shadow. The light. It seemed to come not from the sun but from the city itself - emanating from the walls and rooftops. 

A thin morning fog was disintegrating into shapeless shreds on the drowsy hills.  Fog or smoke? Was it rising from the ground or descending from the sky? And all of this - the moist coolness of a gentle morning - was a happiness she had never been able to feel.

The sky was clear.
The street was a damp mirror.

Her bus slowly descended towards the avenues. As it approached the denser concentration of houses, she was dimly seized by a sense of loss.  Daily human reality was becoming much more visible.
The uncertain fog thinned even more. The sun began to penetrate things more deeply. An open field of buildings -natural, vast and harmonious. The sounds of life were growing everywhere.

In these early morning hours, she would like not much to have the moment stand still, but to have had a different life, so that this moment could have a different feeling, more akin to herself. To hover without thoughts in the fog and the morning.  A longing to be another in all of her pores, a brief glimpse of the end.

To feel everything in fine detail makes her indifferent, except towards what she can never obtain: sensations of which her heart is still too young to grasp, passions and emotions long lost among more visible kinds of success.

To see and feel the dawn made her feel a great hope, but she realized that hope is only literary.
She began to perceive herself as she perceived the city. She realized that all she can hope is for the day to end, like all days.

Hope? What did she really have to hope for?
The day didn’t promise her more than the day. Everything has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Gazing at the vibrant mass of the whole city, just one feeling filled her heart: that she profoundly wished to die, to see no more light shining on this or any city, to think no more, to feel no more.

She walked away as the same woman - just a few hours older, a feeling or two happier, a thought or two sadder.

Behind her eyes, she saw herself seeing, just enough to darken the sun.