...silent? I don't know. I'm dreambound this morning, full of bits of fantasy and illusion and things I can't possibly have seen, waking dreams, not enough sleep to even count as a catnap but hours of laying still, quiet, counting heartbeats and waiting for the murmuring of his voice, her name, to silence itself.

I... am still waiting. I'm awake now, have been most of the night save for about an hour around 5:00, and am beginning to think I'm going mad. I have three journals and of late they all say different things, the same meanderings but from different days, different moods. I don't know which one is true. Perhaps the truth is in the one journal I haven't touched in a long time, the broken secrets and aching hurtful words I never dared leave on pages that were connected to me.

I don't always know who I am, when I am here. In California it's easy, actually. The world outside the apartment is so different, so separate, that I can tell where I stop and it begins. Here, I am lost in the rain and the trees. All I want to do is go wander the parks, the cemetaries, to curl up on the wet grass and wait for the earth to take me back.

Yes. I am quite aware this is not necessarily a healthy state of mind.

I'm still trying to get out to Beaverton. Still failing miserably. Still lost, just out of reach of something, I don't even know what it IS that I'm trying so desperately to touch, to hold, but I am trying with everything I can bring to bear. I suspect in another day or so I will have stopped sleeping entirely. In California, it seems I did nothing but sleep, some days. Here, now... I am awake, always awake, even when I want desperately to rest and dream of nothing, instead I lie and stare and wish.

Both hands are inkstained now, patterns traced on and rubbed off and marked over. I haven't started inking my face yet but I can already tell I... want? Need, perhaps. Need to. Need to feel the ink settling into my blood. Defining myself. I don't know why the need but I know it's there and it's starting to drive me half-mad.

Old, old competition is whispering to me as well. Voices, names, I'd almost forgotten. Apparently coming to Portland has unlocked a few doors I'd forgotten even existed. Odd.

Everything is a fairy tale, in some sense... I have the feeling that I have stumbled into one of the oldest, and all I can wonder is whether or not there will be someone to hold me tightly when the fey queen changes me to ribbons and roses and a speechless, howling, hungry beast.

What's worse, I'm wondering if I want to be held. Perhaps it would be better if I rode off, slipped away, one more in the procession leading nowhere.

I feel, today, as if I can see the road stretching ahead of me, see the assembled court.

Another few days of this...

...and I'll be gone.