Do you believe me?

[I wouldn't have admitted it at the time, but I used to have a secret desire that my life be 'poetic' rather than happy. Then, something of the 'poetic' came along, and all of a sudden, I was crying almost every day, sometimes multiple times a day. I had dizzying conversations with someone but said nothing out loud. Later at night, I cried at the brutality of Babel for muting me: nothing I said would have registered anyway; language was a cloud between canyons. But I eventually realized that I had made it all up; everything was scripted. So the sadness flattened, grew dry and brittle, and I wanted to start over. 'Happiness,' as it turned out, was like the empty form of my 'poetry' but with even shorter cycles. It swelled with meaning for a time and then it miscarried. What went down the drain looked like melted vanilla ice cream.]