From Garret. Gloomy Moods.

Dear Fernando,

Today started out with the sound of breathy winds and thin streams of rain streaking past my window at a forty five degree angle. The light was yellow and pale, drifting fuzzily down through vaporish clouds. The birds kept shouting at one another contentiously. I rose reluctantly to a seated position and buried my face in my hands, moving my fingers through my hair as my thoughts drifted drearily up through the liquor-laden murk of my brain. The thud of blood against my eye-lids counted out my regrets. I got up anyway, kicking myself out of the mess of my sheets aggressively, and marched to the shower with conviction.

I often find myself dragging myself through my days in this fashion, borne breathlessly behind my determination like a undersized dog-walker stumbling at the end of my own taut leash. I stride into my office each morning running high on coffee fumes, exchanging smiles and greetings and I somehow maintain the forceful energy, the upright stance, the friendly exchanges and clever remarks through eight endless hours. In social situations, I talk and laugh, tell grandiose, hand-waving stories. I raise my voice, I raise my glass, I joke and flirt and I'm always up for just one more. But at the end of the day, I collapse into my quiet: silent and solemn. And when I start to write you a letter I always find myself inclined to subject you to yet another list of lamentations.

I don't want to send you nothing but gloomy moods and anxious self-doubt. I would like to give you something full of life. But I also want to be honest. I want to say something and not merely to chatter. And when I am honest, I am sad. You've always been a brooder and a complainer, my friend. But you also have something truly joyful and alive in you. It is the ability to make something. The ability to smile into the abyss. (Do you hear me growing grim again?)

I stopped drawing when I was sixteen. All of a sudden, I curled up into a fear of my creations, unable to stand their presence outside my own head. In a still moment, when my mind wanders and the life around me dims, I trace shapes with my eyes, form textures with my fingers. I envision sculpting the contours of a fond face. I imagine spreading the colors of the sky across the blankness of a canvas. I want to really grasp the world around me, to enfold it in colors and lines and spaces. But I peer at my reality so uncertainly and reach out so timidly. And I feel less than I could be, less than I am.

I try to be honest with you because I hope that you will grasp me and make me solid. Once I called myself Buck Mulligan in disparagement. But I want nothing more than to stride into the world with the steady, certain rhythm of "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan." I can see the implacable fall of those four words more vividly than I have ever been able to see myself.

Garret