I shouldn't be feeling melancholy, but I am. I know what I've pulled down around myself, like a blanket, and I can see it isn't the right comfort for me, but I'm holding onto it anyway.

Camus says there are only two or three true loves in a century, and that everything else is vanity and boredom. Does it make these wrong? I feel that they are essentially wasteful, these lovers we don't have to love, but we might need them anyway. Boredom and vanity come from that same vast emptiness and hunger. Does any semblance of love flesh us into our bodies more fully or make us exempt from living, in the spaces that we're adoring? Love's a joint being passed around. Seriously.

I think we have our moments, though. I do. I went to an undergraduate poetry reading at my university and there was a girl, Jillian. She's a wonderful poet. She has dark hair and blue eyes, her face has a wry, passive quality. But her words are so idealistic and clean, kisses, she said, like red-purple grape leaves.

I know why I'm melancholy. It's this blanket I pulled around myself because of what feels like a battery in my stomach, like a lover I don't have to love. But how when we are young there is such an excess in our skin, it binds itself to whatever it touches.