...thinking all this maximalism would somehow generate happiness?

I can no longer believe in any voodoo spell or laboratory virus. This is something deeper, darker. This comes from the cosmos, from the stars, or the unknown blackness behind them. The shadows in God's boarded-up basement.

And yet ... But what if ... I want to do something impossible. Something astounding and unheard of. I want to scrub the moss off the Space Shuttle and fly Julie to the moon and colonise it, or float a capsized cruise ship to some distant island where no one will protest us, or just harness the magic that brings me into the brains of the Living and use it to bring Julie into mine, because it's warm in here, it's quiet and lovely, and in here we aren't an absurd juxtaposition, we are perfect.

What's the point of trying to fix a world we're so briefly in?

Are my words ever actually audible, or do they just echo in my head while people stare at me, waiting?

I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.

What I'm saying is, when you have weight like that in your life, you have to start looking for the bigger picture or you are gonna sink.