Love is like Orpheus' music. Fleeting and transient. For a moment, I can rest, forget my woes and think beyond the devastating hunger I agonise in day after day. This flickering nebulous emotion fills me temporarily, before it is swallowed in the roiling emptiness of my soul. Yet Orpheus will leave, taking his music with him. His bride trailing behind him, a figment of imagination. And the memory of that music adds the third dimension to your hunger.

Paradoxically, I am incapable of true feeling. The love I speak of is no creation of mine. Empty souls cannot create, they have no substance to them, in the same way zeros cannot be multiplied. I can only devour.

Sometimes I feel like a cud-chewing cow with dull and resigned eyes, gazing at the abattoir where I will die in. Panther says that such emptiness will vanish once I settle down. As if marriage is an institution which is powerful enough to wave a magic wand and vanquish all demons with its lesser ones. And above all, having eked out to reach the end, you find that it does not palliate the emptiness as you thought it would. Instead, it merely alters the external circumstances without changing the internal dimensions. The disappointment will kill you, if the emptiness has not already done so.

Satiety is forever out of reach. I should not believe that. But right now, I can only visualise the vast expanses of barren landscape that is my world and my tiny soul crouched at my feet, huddled upon itself, vanishing beyond the line of sight.