>>From: Belacqua
>>To: Perdita
>>Subject: wittgenstein
>>Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000

It's the most holy day of the week (for christians)...the day when we celebrate god's wonderful creation and go down to the churchyard and sing praises to his highness. Fuck that. God likes to torture me on Sundays. Last week, I was buzzed out of my head and today I'm even more buzzed out of my head. I don't know if I'm going to take the medications until Tuesday or if I should just scrap them because this is getting stupid. I can't even function when I'm like this.

I’m not sure why, but I’m really wrapped up in symbolism and figures of speech. I guess I like them because I can recreate the world with them. I can make something horrible seem peaceful, or maybe even get across to someone a degree of how I feel. That's kind of neat because I feel so trapped here on Earth like I'm only dangling by some people's fingertips, and when they pull their grasp away, I'll finally just fall and be calm. I think you may underestimate your participation in my life. You help me so much, but there just isn't any way for me to be free other than by dying. Putting on my normal glasses will probably make me feel worse. I just wish I could live in a 24-hour drunken haze where everything is soft and funny and your feet never have to touch the ground. I've seriously considered hitting some hard shit to get some sort of super high and just feel great for a little while, but I've never done it. I'm addicted to too many things already.

I know exactly what you mean by normal people's emotions just being tepid. There's a girl in one of my classes who says she wants a creative writing MFA to become a poet, and this girl just doesn't have the fire in her spirit to write anything worthwhile. I know poetry isn't all or even mostly about emotion, but if you can't feel anything coursing through you and tearing you apart with its intensity, then you can't do anything artistically that's worth a damn. I've been totally overrun with emotions where I felt like I was on fire about to be split down the middle, and yet I can see by how people walk and act that they've never felt anything that intensely in their lives. It's like god has just come out of the clouds and wrapped my entire body and mind in his divine shroud and
let me feel something eternal and painful...if god existed...which I'm damn convinced he doesn't. Those experiences are horrible and miserable and painful, but they're REAL: intense and superhuman. Iwould never give them up.

By the way, the subject of this e-mail is a German philosopher (Ludwig Wittgenstein), and I came across a very cool passage when I was reading some of his work last night, and I figured I'd share: "The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man." It’s a very basic statement that you and I both know is so true that it almost goes without saying, but it's so comforting to read something written 80-something years ago that places something like that exactly right. We're not crazy. We know we're not crazy, even though everyone else might think we are. We are living in such completely different worlds that they just can't understand ours. We can see theirs, even though it doesn't make any sense, but they can't see ours. We're always interpreted in relation to their world, and we simply don't fit. We're sitting and laughing and crying just wanting to not exist.

I love you and take care.
Belacqua

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>From: Perdita
>To: Belacqua
>Subject: Re: wittgenstein
>Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000

Belacqua,

I'm not doing so well right now. I'm out of cigarettes, so I can't even fucking go outside to smoke, and I'm way too fucking sedated to even consider walking the four blocks or so to the store to get more. Even if I had some cigarettes, I'd be afraid to go outside for fear that I'd never make it back upstairs.

I'm almost too depressed to write. That almost never happens, and I'm totally not fucking happy about it. I feel like I've pretty much reached the end. I can't put up with this indefinitely. I just can't do it. I've tried too many things for too long and it's done too little good. I'm better, yes, but I'm not so much better that I care about being better. I have an appointment with my therapist tomorrow, and it isn't making me feel better. In fact, it's making me feel worse about things because I have no idea what's so wrong that I should feel this way. I’m just fucked up.

I need to tell you, Belacqua, that I wouldn't recommend doing any hardcore drugs. I won't tell you not to or that it's bad for you or any of that shit, but I can tell you from experience that it's likely to do more harm than good. Drugs fucked me up big time. They made me feel wonderful for a short time, and for awhile they were my only reason to be alive, but it helps for such a short period of time and it makes the rest of the moments feel so much longer.

I haven't done any drugs for a year because my meds were helping so much at first, but now I've totally fucking had it. I'm about two seconds away from ditching the meds and going back to hardcore drugs, if for no other reason than the fact that I know how suicidal they’ve made me on occasion, so maybe I'd kill myself without even knowing it. At this point, that seems like a pretty okay option. I seem to need to either do it without knowing it or give myself a date so I know how much longer I need to put up with life. I've known since I was fifteen that I'm gonna die between the ages of 22 and 26, and I'm in that range now. It's just a matter of time, and I don't believe it's something I can fight.

I hope you're feeling better than I am.
I love you.
Perdita