I wanted something to tell me my future was bright. I can imagine myself saying at the time that life itself was like a book borrowed from the library―something that did not belong to me and was due to expire. How silly.

This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I'd disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream.

If, when I woke up in June, life still wasn't worth the trouble, I would end it. I would jump. This was the deal I made.

I needed a way out of this—the bathroom, the pills, the sleeplessness, the failed, stupid life.

It was too much to consider it all, stretching out, a circular planet covered in creatures and things growing, all of it spinning slowly on an axis created by what - some freak accident? It seemed implausible. The world could be flat just as easily as it could be round. Who could prove anything?

Things were alive. Life buzzed between each shade of green, from dark pines and supple ferns to lime green moss growing on a huge, dry gray rock. Honey locusts and ginkgos aflare in yellows. What was cowardly about the color yellow? Nothing

The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn't exist yet. I was making it, standing there, breathing, fixing the air around my body with stillness, trying to capture something—a thought, I guess—as though such a thing were possible, as though I believed in the delusion described in those paintings—that time could be contained, held captive.

The world was out there still, but I hadn’t looked at it in months. It was too much to consider in all, stretching out, a circular planet covered in creatures and things growing, all of it spinning slowly on an axis created by what — some freak accident? It seemed implausible.

It's a lonely life.