How someone we knew had brought liquid nitrogen in Starbucks cups, and when persuaded to eat a frozen cookie vapor poured out of my mouth like dragon-smoke.

To the moment you realize that the past cannot be undone and the future is set - that you are a tight-rope walker and your forward path, until the end, is undeviating.

The lightening flickers vermilion outside, and the coldness of the air upon my neck stirs the downy hairs into a whirlwind. It's not very late, and yet I am overtaken. Bewitched by Nabokov and his brown-winged angels, and 'Russian Spoken Here'. How that little, comfortable cell is so much like our choices - we can become accustomed to anything. We don't scream, we don't yell, we don't claw at ourselves, we only turn toward the wall with a sigh of the greatest indifference.

The glamor of the exotic and the horrible pain of the real. Creatures of ritual and habit, of two fingers and holy water and the sign of the cross. How dim and pale is my life in the brilliance of the many.

The terrible fear of being proven wrong.