Awaiting the Onslaught of Sickness.

A plague has befallen our house, taking down the matriarch.

She's since recovered, but I am having stomach cramps and look pale (the first is extroadinary, the second nothing too new).

I have no wish to faint or have effluvia shooting out of both ends of my person, so I am hoping that my strong epiglottis will hold, and the stomach aches are a product of my ludicrous sugar consumption over the last few days.

Lord, if I keep well I'll stick to broth tomorrow. Bread on the side.

I wonder what you would do if I was ill? I'm usually the picture of health. I am apt at picturing tender bedside scenes, but maybe you wouldn't know what to do. Used to dealing with weakness in day to day life- and it's a euphemism, isn't it? 'So and so is especially weak, keep an eye on her at the back because...'. Would you handle it with me, who is usually so strong?

Your prettiness is seeping through, out from the dress I took from you.

You aren't even close to pretty and I'd never insult your intelligence by describing you as such. Distinguished ugly, that's better. And what I'd prefer, because it's more noticeable and definitive. Anyone blending in can be pretty, but you're something else entirely. I tried to draw you but it came out wrong. I've forgotten your face in the past few days. I thought it was ingrained upon my memory, but in this picture I've just got your hair and something resembling Barbra Streisand, facially.

I thought I saw you on Friday, in the half-light of a theatre audience. I was wrong. But I'd have liked to. I'd have liked to see that we like doing the same things. This is all a bit Notes-on-a-Scandal in reverse, isn't it?

My dream girl don't exist... because she's a fully grown woman with lines and iron grey hair. No girl. No slip of a thing. She may as well be a dream. Though I can touch her, I can get close, I can float about around her peripheries and weave myself into her seams.

What I'd really like to do is ask what's wrong- or maybe everything's just so right in her life that she doesn't need other people? It can't be. Where does she eat lunch? This is a question that niggles away at me. She must do it, so where? In her office? Why not with the rest of us?