Should I, or should I not, go back to being myself? Everywhere I go I bump into something that astonishes me. Like today, for example. Oh destiny! Oh, humanity!

I was walking along the river around midday. I wasn't hungry. Everything was sad. A cold and damp wind was blowing from some invisible mountain, and the grey clouds, pregnant with rain, were quickly approaching. From a distance I saw a man wearing a green coat rummaging in the garbage that covered most of the area surrounding the river, as if he were looking for something. When I approached him and he, hearing the noise of my steps, turned around, I saw an interesting face kind of tainted by pain, but that pain was also the essential part of his expression, if you know what I mean. He was younger than I had expected. His hair was black and long, tied up in a pony tail. I asked him what he was looking for, just out of boredom.

"Flowers!" he said, "and I can't find any."

"But it's not the right season!" I told him, smiling.

"There are many flowers," he said "in my garden there are roses and honeysuckles of two types. one, my dad gave to me! They grow so quickly...but I've been looking for them for two days already and I can't find them. Even out here there's always flowers, yellow, blue and red, but I can't find any."

I realised there was something weird about him (!!) so I tried to take control of the conversation.

"But, what do you want to do with the flowers?" I asked him.

He smiled in a weird way and said "if you promise you're not gonna tell anybody, I'll tell you that I promised I'm going to give a bouquet to my girlfriend!"

"That's nice" I said.

"Oh, she's got everything she wants" he said, "she's rich!"

and I was like "And yet I'm sure some flowers will be a nice surprise"

"Yeah but she's got jewels and a crown!" he carried on

"And what's her name?" I asked

But he just continued "if I could get some money myself I would be a different person...I used to be well-off once...but now everything's finished for me! Now I am..." and he looked like he was gonna cry or something.

"So, you were happy once?" I asked

"Hell yes! I wish I were as I used to be! I used to be happy all the time, as light as a feather..."

"Henry!" an old woman (who suddenly appeared) yelled. "Where the hell have you been? I've been lookin for you for hours! Come eat!"

"Is he your son?" I asked her.

"Yes, he sure is my son...God gave me a heavy cross to carry..."

"How long has he been like this, if I can ask?"

"This quiet, for a few months...and thank God he is like this now! Before, for a whole year, he was a nightmare, we had to tie him up sometimes. Now he is fine, only, he's always making up stories about kings and emperors. He was such a good boy and he used to write so well...Then suddenly everything went dark for him. He became ill, and then angry. Now he is as you've seen him. If I had to start telling you the story from the beginning..."

I stopped her flow of words to ask her "What period was it then the one he describes as being a happy one?"

"Poor him..." she sighed with a sad smile "He means the time when he was out of his mind. He's always talking about it as the best time, when he was locked up and he didn't understand anything at all!"

These words made me feel sort of ,dunno, weird. But it was enough to decide to leave them.

"So, he was happy" I was then thinking. "Human beings are then doomed to be perfectly happy only when they haven't acquired reason yet, and when they lose it! And now he is unhappy...and yet, I envy his melancholy and his spiritual turmoil. You go out full of hopes looking for flowers to give to your queen, in the winter! And you get depressed because you can't find any and you don't understand why that is. I, on the other hand, go out with no hope at all and with no goal at all, and I come home exactly the same way. You talk enthusiastically about the kind of man you could be if you had money. You are lucky, because you can attribute your unhappiness to a real obstacle. You don't feel that your sadness lies in your broken heart, in your fucked up brain, and that against that no king on earth could fight."

Anyone who laughs at an ill person who makes an effort to go a step further, who has some sort of goal despite everything, should die suffering. Each step that allows that person to walk a still unknown path is a little bit of hope gained.

And you think you can call this an illusion? You lazy bastards!! Illusion! What is there left if not Faith, faith in anything, (which is faith in God coz God really can be anything, don't you think?)

The belief that the extract of a root can heal, that a dream will come true, what is it if not some sort of power that surrounds everything and heals everything and comforts us?

Father, I don't know you, and now I feel you have turned away from me. Call me! Stop being so silent! Are you going to be angry if I come to you? Don't be angry if I stopped walking...the world is the same everywhere, in suffering and joy. But I only want to suffer or cheer where you are, in front of you.

And you, do you want to chase me away?

26 November

Aaahh, here we are. Sometimes I tell myself: "My dear, you are doomed. Nobody else is so tormented. " But then I read something that was written by some poet centuries ago, and it's practically like reading my own heart. I'm destined to suffer a lot more...and there have been many others who have suffered so much in the past.. : (

He knows that I'm suffering. Today his eyes penetrated my heart. I found him alone. I didn't say anything, and he looked at me. And in him I didn't see anymore the same beauty, the same light of spirit. All that had disappeared to my eyes. What I saw was pure, simple interest and compassion.

Why couldn't I throw myself at his feet? Why couldn't I hug him and kiss him?

He went to the piano and started humming a tune while playing. A sweet little tune. I had never realised his lips were so sexy. It was as if they opened just enough to let the notes in, and to let their echos out....

Whatever, I can't really describe this.

I want to kiss him so bad, and yet I feel that to kiss those lips would be a sin. A sin???

22 November

I cannot ask: "Leave him to me!", and yet sometimes I feel like he is mine. I can't ask: "Give him to me!" because he is someone else's. I am fooling myself and my feelings, but if I stopped I'd give space to even more craziness, I think.

21 November

He doesn't see, he doesn't feel that he is distilling a poison which will be his and my ruin, and I, a complete idiot, drink from the cup he gives me for my oblivion. What good does it do the friendly way he often (not often...sometimes) looks at me? The compassion he sometimes has in listening to my whining?

Yesterday, as I was about to leave, he took my hand and said: "See you my dear Oscar!" 'My Dear Oscar'...it was the first time he used 'my dear' and I felt like I was gonna pass out (I know it's not much, but said from him...) I repeated it to myself like a billion times and last night, as I was about to fall asleep, I suddenly told myself: "Good night, my dear Oscar!"

And then I started laughing like an idiot.

I'm grateful for your good advice. Please, stay calm, and let me be until the end. With all my tiredness, I still manage to keep myself standing.

I respect religion, you know. I understand it can be helpful for those who are tired or suffering. But can it work like that for everybody? If you look at the world, you'll see the billion times in which this hasn't been the case. And why should it be like that for me? Wasn't the Son of God himself who said that around Him will be those given to Him by His Father? And what if I'm not among those that were given to Him? What if The Father wanted to keep me for Himself? Please, do not misinterpret these words, they're not meant to be cynical and they're actually pretty innocent. I'm opening up all my soul to you, or I would have kept my mouth shut. It seems that we all have to suffer as much as we're supposed to, each one of us has to empty their cup. And if that cup seemed too bitter to God, why should I have to pretend it is sweet to me? And why should I be ashamed when I find myself in the terrible space that exists between being and not being, when past sparkles on the dark abyss of the future and here, around me, everything sinks and ends with me? Isn't this the very voice of the creature which has been deprived of itself and ruined which, in the last depths of its energies pointlessly aiming to the sky, shrieks: " Oh God, Oh God, why have Thou forsaken me?"

And why should I be ashamed of these words, why should I be afraid of this moment, if not even He who folds the skies as if they were canvas was?

She scolded me for my excesses. My excesses, which means that sometimes I drink a whole bottle instead of just one glass. "Don't do this!" she said "think of P.!"

"Yeah, sure, think....but I do not think. He is always in my soul, whatever, heart. Today I was sitting at that bus stop where I recently saw him ..."

She changed the subject, she probably couldn't be bothered to hear anymore of my stories.

I'm a finished man. He can do whatever the hell he wants with me.

Sometimes I go to sleep with the desire, often even with the hope, not to wake up ever again, and in the morning when I open my eyes and see the sun again I feel sad.

If at least I were unstable. If I could blame time, someone else, something I failed to do, the unbearable weight of my sickness would be less painful. Fuck my life! I know even too well that the fault is all mine, and mine only. But not even the guilt....enough to say that in me is the source of all trouble, there were once was the source of all happiness. Am I not still the one who could spend hours just engaging with his own feelings? The one who was able to disclose a paradise at each step, and that had a heart big enough to contain the entire world?

This heart of mine is now dead. No more feelings are coming out of it.

My eyes are dry and I'm constantly frowning as I haven't cried for so long.

I suffer so much because I've lost what was the only joy of my life. The magical force with which I used to create worlds around me is gone.

And now, I stand by the window and look at that faraway hill and at the sun that cuts through the mist of the morning, and at the river that seems to flow towards me....if I look at this amazing nature that seems like it's been frozen in a badly painted picture, I feel absolutely NOTHING. I feel like there's a void instead of my heart, instead of my soul.

No tears, nothing at all. I even prayed, prayed God, after so long, to make me feel something.