Oh well, as Etain of the Second Sight said, "Easy come, easy go."

However, I just could not wake up completely today. I think all those gloomy predictions of a crash from my maniac state have come true. I slept at three in the morning and only managed to drag myself out of bed at nine at night. I did stop dreaming a couple of times and hovered in one of those ineluctable states you get when you are at the boundaries of sleeping and waking.

Perhaps this is why I have taken to reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman again. I wish to remain in one of the skerries of dream and not wake up to face the world. I am a hermit crab, venturing out only to the common kitchen to get milk for my cereal or to microwave some instant noodles for sustenance.

This journal is about a year old. I remember my first entry under a different name, before I settled for "alithiel". I wrote an entry about September 11. Nothing remains of that diary or that entry now. It does not matter.

My life is fragile, a fleet footed wisp that escapes me. Even this electronic etching will be consumed by time. As will I.

Dreams plague me. Weird dreams, startling fragments of warnings. Rapes, monsters, and illicit loves. Escape, in a modern labyrinth of escalators and shopping malls. Bookcases with books in the garden. An old school teacher reappears, the good father figure come to warn me away from the primrose path of dalliance, or from the painful lessons of false friendships. Perhaps they foretell a time where I will be less inclined to solitude, and with that, painful loneliness. I do not know. A silver lover's knot unravels to become grasping claws, a hair comb that when worn, becomes the instrument of Snow-White's fainting sleep.

I wish. I wish. I do not know what I want.

However, I do know what I must do. I have to finish this essay before I flunk out of this course.

Why can I not put all these fragments of information together? A puzzle with all the pieces, but unable to meld them into a whole.

I remember bits of what I wrote in my head. Something about an entity of glass, so fragile, and once shattered, becomes irreplaceably lost. The sparkling pieces can be melted and remoulded, but perhaps the glass will remember the phantom pain. You know when you are broken beyond repair and have to remade into something new. You remember the past.

My mind is confused. It cannot grasp the whole. Disjointed thoughts that make sense, but need an epiphany of the soul.