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Pentecost. That old familiar sadness has seeped back into my life. I had another nightmare about Ana last night and woke up confused and disoriented and covered in a cold damp sheen of sweat. I haven’t been sleeping well these past few days on account of the heat and I can’t tell whether it was the heat that’s to blame for precipitating this precipitous decline in my mood and thus plaguing my already restless sleep with these feelings or if something inside me had already sufficiently slipped without me noticing and it was the heat that simply created the conditions through which these things were finally able to take full purchase. I am haunted by a pervasive shroud of worthlessness. Why is it that this feels like my baseline state, and not instead the near-obstreperous joy and amazement I felt so sure of just days ago? Someone told me recently that it’s not that my setbacks are particularly severe, only that I have experienced them particularly severely. It’s begun to dawn upon me lately how shallow my sadness really is. This is the thing I hate the most about myself.

It rained throughout the day, and it’s now once again cool, almost cold. I’ve been smoking more again recently. Martin and I get on calls and we walk somewhere and sit down next to each other across that thin virtual thread and we smoke. Months-old packs from winter of last year that I bought with the intention to finish with Ana only to find out not just once but then in the mornings and then in the evenings and then at night and then seemingly every goddamned time I would ask, when I still cared enough to ask, that she apparently just didn’t want to do it anymore, at least not with me. I don’t believe in metaphors anymore. I have been thinking of ending things with Ada soon. It’s not that I don’t believe in metaphors anymore. It’s just that it’s exactly like everyone says. There’s nothing wrong with me except me.