'PREFACE' to a story I never wrote...

There was no Earth and no sky, only interminable darkness stretching on ahead of me for eternity, and I was steadily walking into it.She kept calling me, begging me to stop, her voice breaking with pain and desperation, but I walked on. The darkness came closer with each step and the voice grew faint.My heart was breaking into a thousand tiny bits. I wanted nothing more than to turn around and go back to her, but I knew that I must not.I must walk on and embrace the darkness. Every fiber of me cried out in protest; my vision was blinded with tears and my feet grew heavy.I realized I could not do it; I realized that in walking away from her I was walking away from my life.I stopped and turned around....

I woke up with tears in my eyes and her name on my lips.For a while I could not understand what had happened... where was she? Then I slowly looked around the room; at the crumpled sheets, at the naked body of the man lying beside me. I laid back on the pillow, a flimsy blanket provided by the hotel covering my nudity, as the events of the previous night came tumbling back.

There is often a very thin line between agony and ecstasy; perhaps only a difference of perspective.As I lay there then, I wasn't sure of what I felt.Agony for what I had done last night, or ecstasy for having proved my point; agony for what I had done to myself, or ecstasy for what I had done to her. A tear slid down the corner of my eye. 'Forgive me', I murmured, 'perhaps it wasn't meant to be'....