>>From: Belacqua
>>To: Perdita
>>Subject: days
>>Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2000

I have been fighting a headache since I woke up this morning, and no amount of aspirin is even beginning to help. All it's doing is making me dizzy and fucking up my stomach. On top of that, I've been having bad, but brief panic spells which really suck when they happen in the middle of class. For some reason, they make me want to reach into my own chest and pull out my heart. They'll just come out of nowhere and make my heart go crazy and I can't breathe and I kind of lose track of who and where I am for a little while. On the fun scale, it's pretty near the bottom. Beyond all that, I've been so tired I can't move all day. I've been nearly asleep almost the entire afternoon, barring a few minutes when I made something to eat. I know if I go to bed anytime soon, I'll be up at 4:00 in the morning unable to get back to sleep. I could really use a drink right now.

I was reading one of your journal entries and I was struck by an experience I had that I can't remember if I've told you about or not. I'm getting really bad about that lately. In any case, my friend and I were sitting on his balcony smoking a cigarette when I looked up at the sky. The sun was behind a large cloud with sun rays bursting out all around the cloud, and through a thin haze, you could see the ball of the sun feebly trying to break through the clouds. I stared up at it and said it looked like god was angry at us and was on the verge of delivering some sort of divine punishment on Earth. My friend stared at me in disbelief for a second before he claimed it was a hopeful scene because the sun is going to come out from behind the clouds and shine eventually. The more I stared at it, the more unlikely his version became because at that moment, the clouds looked absolutely furious, and the sun looked like it was going to unleash some unspeakable horror. The more he looked at it, the less sense my explanation made to him. Where he saw hope, I saw utter hopelessness and impending doom.

The same thing happened to me with the second movement of Beethoven's 7th symphony. I was listening to it, and it almost moved me to tears because of how mournful I thought it sounded. When I mentioned it to Cassandra, she said she thought it sounded triumphant, like a soldier returning home after a war. Where she saw triumph, I saw misery. It becomes really difficult to try and experience anything that moves you when everyone around you reacts in the opposite way to it. I have to censor my reactions to things so people won't think I've completely lost it, and that gets so frustrating. I refuse to give roses to girls (or anyone for that matter) because roses die. I can't see the romance involved in watching something dangerous and beautiful wither before your eyes and fall apart. I see omens in everything, even though I don't really believe in anything like omens. I guess when I give a gift, it's a sort of symbol, and a dying symbol of love unsettles me. I think dead roses and black roses are incredibly beautiful, but I don't see them as emblems of love. They’re symbols of sadness and ultimate despair. O rose, thou art sick!

I don't see my therapist this week. It feels kind of odd. I don't know that I particularly like it. Wow...I've been sitting here for about ten minutes blankly staring at the screen without moving. I think maybe it is time to retire. I hope your day ended better than it started, and I hope tomorrow is a vast improvement.

I love you.
Belacqua

---

>From: Perdita
>To: Belacqua
>Subject: Re: days
>Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2000

Belacqua,

I have a particular aversion to flowers because the smell reminds me of funeral parlors. It's this odd association I have because of all the funerals I went to when I was young. So, the smell of flowers is the same to me as the smell of death. I've never understood the whole flower thing. There is, however, a florist not far from where I work that has blue roses that are positively gorgeous. The first time I saw them, I knelt down on the ground in front of them and totally embarrassed my coworker because I stared at them for about five minutes while she just stood there confused. It's really strange. I see beautiful things, and I feel like I just don't know what to do with them and I can only stare. Luckily, the florist is constantly replenishing the supply, so I can always walk by there to see the blue roses without smelling them, and I can ignore the fact that they're always dying before new ones are put there in their place.

I'm not feeling a hell of a lot better today. My boss is going nuts trying to make me feel guilty as hell about nearly everything on the planet. It's really hard to get motivated to do work I don't care about, and I can't TELL him I don't care about it because I might lose my job, and we certainly can't have that. I can only imagine what would happen if I lost my job. I wouldn't be able to afford ANYTHING because I spend my money nearly as fast as I make it.

It's fucking cold here today and I'm about two seconds away from going postal on the whole fucking school. The only coworker I really talk to is out today, and there are all sorts of things I probably should know how to do but I don't because I never bothered to learn, and she’s not here for me to ask. So, my boss wants this memo to go out to everyone in the division today and I can't do it because I need her help. Thank god for overachievers. If it weren't for the people who overcompensate, I'd be totally fucked.

My boss is about to come back from a meeting, so I should probably start working on those damn memos, but I hope to get another chance to write today. I hope your headache goes away and you start feeling better. Only two more days....

I love you.
Perdita