I didn't tell anyone where I went after the hospital, Debbie was pissed but that was better than pity. By New Year's Eve she seemed to have forgotten about it.

Friday January 5th 1979, it's been 8 days. The guys haven't mentioned the fit I had on our way back from London, the one that landed me in the hospital where I awoke to blinding lights and a hospital gown, where everything let me know I had less control over my life than I had thought. It was a cruel joke, epilepsy crept into me when success was near at hand, and now nothing is as fulfilling as I dreamt it.

I would blame all the pills but I know it began before that night. One evening all become insipid and without purpose, all my aspirations were and are nothing but *excessive flash points beyond all reach and as the days overlap my life has become *a valueless collection of hopes and past desires.
It shouldn't be like this, and yet it is. I do not know where it has come from, this darkness that consumes me every hour of the day and fills me with dread for every next second.

I step off the stage, breathless and shaking from the cold sweat. Stephen is telling me something but my mind is suddenly distracted by the girl with long legs and short hair across the room. My heart had already been fluttering from the performance, but now it was exalted.

She was washing her hands outside the toilets, she looked up at me with big weary eyes.
"What are you doing here?" I ask surprised, I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought of her all these days, I had been worried she would succeed in her next attempt to suicide.
"Something's gotta pay for the cigarettes" she responds signaling with her eyes to the tag on her shirt, her name on it.
"You work here then? Did you like our performance?"
"I could not say, I was cleaning toilets. But I liked the music."
I feel a smile form my lips, I hesitate a bit then decide to ask if she wants to get dinner with me.
"I'm not hungry."
"Me neither."
"What are we waiting for then?"

We Found an American-Styled Diner.
We sit in a booth, her across from me she asks "do you like pancakes?"
I shrug my shoulders, she glares straight faced into my eyes. I look away, then back at her, "what?"
She lets out a slight laugh, "nothing. Your eyes are very mesmerizing."
I flush a bit looking down at the menu which I hold up, though I don't really read it.

The waiter asks if we'd like something to drink, she looks at me again and blatantly asks if I'm paying. I nod, she orders a chocolate milkshake. I do too.

It's quiet for a couple minutes except for her fiddling with the fork.
"How have you been?" I finally ask.
She thinks, "hmm, I've been so down it feels like summer, empty and dry. You?"
"I'm fine."
"Do you compose the lyrics to your songs?"
I nod, "yeah, why?"
"Then you're lying."
"Excuse me?"
She straightens up in her seat, "you say you're fine, your poetry says otherwise. So you're either lying to me or your public. Which one is it?"
She made me feel like a child being interrogated by its parents, except she's too clever to be a parent.

"I suppose to both, to everyone. I'm just an act, I don't know, I don't know what I am." I admit still taken aback by her observations.
"We're all actors, life's our play. We each get a brief moment on the stage, a chance to speak, but then we must walk off."
"And if this was your last scene, what would you say?"
She ponders about it while the waiter brings our milkshakes, he takes our order which is just fries, then she comes to a conclusion:
"That there isn't a definite meaning to living; only the one you create for yourself."
Her words circle my brain, it's like she's deciphered a question I've been trying to answer ever since the world began. Do I know the subject I want portrayed in my play? Hardly, it changes all the time, I just want to be fulfilled. But how? I'm completely hollow.

I'm still thinking when she asks,
"Why does it scare you to speak of your feelings?"
"It doesn't." I lie.
"Maybe not on stage, but have you spoken face to face to someone about it?"
I shake my head, "do you speak openly about yours?"
"Sometimes, no, not really. Only to my journals, psychiatrist, and now you apparently."
"It's useless isn't it?"
"Mostly, yeah, because-"
"No one understands" I complete her sentence. We gaze into each other's eyes and I know then that no one but her could comprehend what it's like to see it all at once, and still see nothing at all. Perhaps it was not chance that landed us in the same place at the same time, perhaps it was fate. She could help me understand the growing monster in me, and I could help her keep hers from ending her life.

|| Hello, just letting you guys know that the lines that are in *italics are lyrics by Joy Division. I will credit them down here whenever I quote a song.

*Twenty Four Hours - Joy Division.