I wake up every morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounds and as impossible as it actually is, happy. But during the course of each day my heart will descend from my chest into my stomach. By early afternoon, I am overcome by the feeling that nothing is right, or nothing is right for me, and by the desire to be alone. By evening I am fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of my grief, alone in my aimless confusion, alone even in my loneliness. I am not sad, I repeat to myself over and over, I am not sad. As if I might one day convince myself. Or fool myself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because my life has unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. I fall asleep with my heart at the foot of my bed, like some domesticated animal that is no part of me at all. And each morning I wake with it again, in the cupboard of my rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon I am again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.