There’s hardly a minute of my life in which I’m not obsessively fretting about something. I suppose I get a break when I sleep, but even then, I have horrible anxiety dreams; ones in which someone attacks me and I go to scream, but no sound comes out. I’m rendered mute by fear. Or dreams in which my childhood home is suddenly moved to a swampland, and I have to wade through water where crocodiles and other awful beasts wait to devour me. I toss and turn in my twisted sheets, restless, ruminating.

I’m often worried by how overpowering loneliness can be.

We are ourselves before we are actually ourselves. Clay waiting to be shaped by experience, perhaps, but there’s something pre-formed about our personalities before they are even molded.

I write this book while sitting in my front room just before dusk. Faint light through the window renders me a ghost of myself. i gaped at the wall where someone(my -ex) has scrawled “LOVE" on the wall in shaky cursive in the middle of an illustration of a heart broken in two. There are other indiscernable writings near it. One said. Run Away.

Crystal Evans