I have long thought that we build continuity into the world because we, ourselves, lack it entirely.

The wildest passions exist to be extinguished. They cannot exist permanently, for in so doing they would outlive us. We would be integrated into them, just as we are integrated into abstract things - things we have created ourselves - such as society. We long for that sense of permanence because we fear loss, yet it is precisely the sense of loss which drives us! A novel ravishes our intellect because, before it existed, we were ripe for it. It cannot do so again, for in the act of reading we plant seeds which will blossom when we read another; and I believe the same follows for all emotion. We love only so that we may love again, but with greater fervour! We kiss so that we may reach that blissful moment when we stop, when the lips part and we realise that the kiss, which is everything, will never be enough!

Mercilessly lonely, I write these worthless parodies of beautiful literature in the tranquil early hours in the full knowledge that, in the shattering light of day, I shall no longer be the same person. Indeed, the very act of writing soothes the tumultuous collisions of my contradictory thoughts, it eases the sea-sickness of my soul and holds me upright, so that I may rest. Tomorrow, my face will crack in more or less the same fashion when I automatically acknowledge my neighbour as I do each morning; my voice will still waver when I buy the newspaper at my local shop and I consider asking the chap who has served me there for seven years how he is, before burying the question in my larynx. It has been seven years and each day that I did not ask re-inforced the unacceptability of even considering it. In short, my exterior being, the 'self' which our noisey and brutally insecure society takes as for a person's whole, will change little. Yet the raging passion of thought, that indescribable phantasma which took me by the hand and lead me out of Life and into being - my private state of utter sadness - will be written out like a bad soap character. Writing is my constant, the state of permanence others see in relationships, or novels.

I am gagged and bound by self-knowledge. I cannot conduct a conversation without realising that it is simply another way for me to be alone. I impose the most wonderful of literary touches on people because I can; it is not that I believe others revolve around me and my private thoughts. I just feel separate. My wallowing is harmless; after all, unlike the fantasists of literature, I expect nothing from Life. I am more than content with the vulgar and alluring apparition of it all.

I write, and I am placid - like a river, shimmering in the dolorous sunlight, winding its gentle and inevitable way towards the eternal ocean with a serene restlessness. The pen drops, and the seeds are planted.

It is not uncommon, should one be inclined to search for me on any given day, to find an old wooden chair supporting my meagre frame in a particular establishment in town. I use the word 'establishment' in order to avoid using the word 'Cafe', for fear of conjuring up images of Paris and leading you, imaginary reader, down conceited streets. The establishment I so frequently frequent is one of many such establishments in the rather odd city into which I appear to have flung myself and not unusual in any respect other than that it is the only one, to my knowledge, to have the word 'Cafe' in its name.

I have become attached to this little building because the first coffee I drank there was one of the best I have ever tasted. Not that I am snobbish in this regard - I can distinguish between good coffee and bad coffee, but little more. No, this one, the first one, tasted (or so it seemed to me) of the girl sat in the corner across from me, her whirling mane winding its lavish way across part of her worried face. I, the stickly flaneur, legs crossed as though preparing for a story about a boot to the groin (such is life), dreamily drinking up the subtle contours of her feline figure, nonchalantly draped across a table. She was Fairtrade.

Yet, I ask myself, how could each of those dreary sips possibly draw from a cup so mundane, so utterly cliched? Cliches, by definition, are prior to reality. They are the sworn enemies of dreams, ever reductive, ever sapping away at our will and our illusions of freedom. I think: the elation of that first cup of coffee was my own fantasy. Whether the girl was beautiful or not, I could not say, but I could say that the snapshot, in my mind's eye, of her languid posture, the vacant brilliance of her autumnal face, partly traced by windswept locks, was itself a motif. It was my own vivid, heaving version of a Gaugin, a Manet bursting at the seams with the imprints my own psychological traumas. My mind had made a masterpiece of that scene, but even now demonstrably lacks the artistry with which to immortalise it in a fragment, or an image. It was the impossibility, that inaccessibility of the beauty I find in art and life, which flowed into me and shocked my central nervous system. The caffeine was stronger that day.

I think: that empty seat mourns the absence of my fantasy. This sickly black dross tastes fouler by the day, yet I each day I return. It is a form of melancholia, such as life, for each day brings that vintage sense of loss - the loss of something I never had, defeat by some unknown force I shall never tame.