The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

He needs to die.

I am not going to write, tonight, who I mean by that. I have written a great deal already, more honesty than I usually permit myself in a single sitting, and I think this last line deserves to stand alone, unexplained, the way certain truths are better left when the hand writing them has not yet found the courage to finish the thought all the way through. I have circled it, across this entire entry, without ever once letting my pen land on it directly — a habit, I think, older than this particular grievance, older than most things I still carry. Perhaps by the time I trust myself to write the rest of that sentence, the visions themselves will have changed again, and the thought will no longer need finishing at all. I would like to believe that. I am not certain belief and evidence are the same thing, and I have never once pretended otherwise, not even here, not even to myself.

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I will close this book now, and set the pen down, and let whatever passes for sleep in a world like this one finally take me, if it's willing to. Tomorrow, I will wear the composure again, the severe, unbothered mask this household has grown used to seeing across the breakfast table, and none of them will know, watching me pour tea with a perfectly steady hand, exactly how much of tonight's entry I spent trying not to weep.

That is, I have come to understand, the particular cost of being who I am. I do not resent it, exactly. I have simply stopped expecting it to ever become easier to carry.

— End of Chapter —