The melancholia: it was especially cruel and persistent thursday at two. Death's-head at the feast: I break down at the sight of everything. In sackcloth and ashes, I was.

I was striking up pure Vedder on my guitar (Cobain's or Amos's, I resolved, would only fatten the choler) clad in my underthings on the rug. The Ds and As of "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter" came humming from my copper threads; the blue of the wood apparently blue-black in half shadow. My guitar, it is kind.

Then the blue devils, cork-stopped for a while by my minute affair with the fretboard came spilling out fast, like bad blood after a fatal blow. I began to break down, without warning; my deadened sobs, they rose in the middle of the song.

Alone: my status. My wholeness aches for him. Him.


"I swear I recognize your breath.
Memories, like fingerprints are slowly raising.
Me, you wouldn't recall for I'm not my former...
all these changes taking place
I wish I'd seen the place
But no one's ever taken me."
--"Elderly Woman behind the Counter in a Small Town", Pearl Jam