After a reading of "Underworld"

Before I went to bed last night, I read about Nick's complacent life and Esmerelda's murder, which turned out to be a bad decision.

All night I was tormented by the most joyless, hopeless dreams I've ever had, not nightmares, but dreams with everything good about life sucked out of them. I dreamt about Underworld, about you in New York, sick, and everything all mixed together, and I dreamt of my former life in New York, my school cafeteria, a former professor, New York at night in the winter, and I was running through the snowy streets barefoot, and it was so cold. I woke up so cold, not physically, but my chest was like ice, at 3 in the morning, and I felt all the desperation and loneliness and heartache of life, like I'd lived each individual, miserable life I've just read about but was still me on top of it, half a world away from home which doesn't even seem like my home anymore, just the house in which my parents live, and for a minute, I thought I wasn't even going to make it through the night, and when that passed, like I would surely be sick, and when that passed, just a throbbing grief.

Now it's morning, the sun is out, I made coffee, but I feel a remnant of that emptiness of the night, like somebody ripped a hole above my stomach.